I started on one of the smaller instances, and guess what? They didn’t make it. I spent about two days setting up my account searching for all the communities I wanted, and had a great feed. Then about a week later, they were gone. I can’t fault the admin- they were doing a lot of work and running up a server bill largely for gratis, but I lost all that setup time. So when I had to start a new account I chose to go to one of the moderately large instances because I didn’t want it to go poof overnight again.

What I’m saying is there is safety in the medium to large instances.

That said, I do have some problems with some of the largest instances throwing their weight around in performing global bans on users from other instances whose world views differ from theirs.

I’m beginning to see that in order for lemmy to be truly federated, users must also become federated