I have accounts on three instances but I’m unsure which one should be my main account.
The transparency in funding and discussion of donations, the country or state it is hosted in (local laws), does its moderation policy align with your values?
If it’s a small instance fewer communities may be federated already so you may need to be the one to manually search for them for the first time (thus adding them to your instance’s “all” feed). Larger instances will already have many communities discovered and a fuller all feed. Though with lemmyverse.net and some determination you can build up the federated communities list up entirely yourself (and give everyone registered there an expanded “all”).
I did a lot of that building up because there wasn’t much content that interested me coming through.
In hindsight it may have meant I should have chosen a different instance but now it’s done I’m pretty happy and as you mentioned, it expanded the content for other users on the instance
The moderation policy can be important, on lemmy.zip they’re somewhat anti-defederation so I spent a half hour banning all the big communities from the problematic instances
