I joined the fediverse a couple months ago, before the reddit protest started, admins of lemmy.ml were asking people to join smaller instances because they were being overloaded.
So an instance with less than 500 users was the parameter I used to choose, that instance was lemmy.world lol, look at where they are now.
I created a second account on lemm.ee only a few days ago for various reason, being populated wasn’t one of them :)
with as much users as possible
Wouldn’t this lead to the same problems lemmy.world is having?
I would recommend choosing based on interests, rules that align with you, proximity to where you live, stuff like that. Population is not a problem, you can still participate everywhere because of federation.
What I saw and the reason I fled was their “freedom of speech” only applied to things mods agreed with, that’s no real freedom of speech in my book.
While I didn’t have any personal problem with them, I saw people and communities being banned for reasons that were not logical to me and I had the very strong impression their convoluted “explanations” were just a cover for their personal preferences, mind this is just my opinion.
I’m fine with freedom of speech as long as it’s coherent and not just based on what mods personally like or don’t.
I believe they do have the right to do what they want with “their” instance, I just don’t want to be in a place like that.