@sahat@jfriday
I lost a handful of followers and follows when I moved from Fosstodon to two smaller instances. But that was because Octodon seems a little trigger-happy, and has blocked the two instances I now use. The user-migration feature was a little bit manual, but largely worked.
(Fosstodon is great, BTW. The reasons I migrated were (a) to get a higher character limit and (b) to split my Fedi presence into ND and other stuff, so that I don't have to come out as #ActuallyAutistic to IRL friends and colleagues.)
Jess, you could try posting to one of the most relevant groups (such as @actuallyautistic), explaining what's happened, giving your old Fedi ID (if that's comfortable and safe to do), and inviting your old followers to follow you again. You won't get them all back that way, but it'll be a start. And you can always follow the old crowd when you see them around; some of them will follow you back.
I'm sorry I don't have a better answer than that, but I hope you'll stick around here. 🙂