Really the biggest effect your home instance has is who you're defederated with. Your instance admin can choose to defederate with an instance at any time, blocking your communication with that instance.

For most instances this isn't a real problem because nobody defederates without a clear reason, but in some cases like Beehaw users were upset that the admin decided to defederate with instances they use.

• local filter for posts in communities you're not subscribed to
• defederated and blocked - of the instance and from the instance
• hosting, updating, performance, uptime, sustainability, risk of disappearance, security, responsiveness on issues
• settings, UI, additional hosted tools
• rules and focus for local communities

IMO there's nothing to keep in mind on everyday use. But these things are things to consider when deciding what to use in a mindful manner.

Some instances have a tight thematic focus and, if you want to create communities, you should probably do it on an instance where it will be on-topic. That's the reason my main account is on midwest.social instead of the first instance I signed up for: slrpnk.net has a tight focus on environmental sustainability.

It matters. The admins mater. They control federation, styling, upgrades, security, performance, and admin-level moderation things. Also, some instances try and cater to certain communities (e.g. lemmy.zip tries to focus on gaming and tech).

If your instance goes down, you lose all you posts. vlemmy.net was an instance and they just vanished recently. lemmy.fmhy.ml just disappeared yesterday, I couldn't find much info besides a post vaguely mentioning that their domain name got seized by the Mali government (idk why). Besides being shut down, also due to federation issues. beehaw.org has defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, meaning you can't really interact with each other for the most part. Some instances like lemmygrad.ml and exploding-heads.com are disliked by many instance owners due to politics and got defederated so they are sorta on their own island.

Edit: Well... techically, your posts aren't lost, you can still find them in other instances. But your images are gone since images do not get federated (unless someone made an archive) and you lost the account and any direct messages, and you have to manually check if you want to see any comments to a post that you posted before it got shut down. Just a huge inconvenience.

I dont have my account on lemmy.ml because my opinions do not align with theirs.

Also choosing an instance with servers close to you is a plus as well for loading times

You could also be in a position where the insurance just disappears.

I joined lemmy.fmhy.ml which has now disappeared, from what I gather they received a take down notice.

So whilst but important which instance in general being with a reputable one can matter.

In general it's not that important but there are a few considerations. There have been instances that just disappeared so that isn't impossible. There could be instances that yours is defederated from and that would affect what content you get. Also when searching for communities you might not see things you would be interested in because nobody on your instance has searched for it yet. The first successful search for a community requires you to know the actual community address and then that causes it to federate with your home community so if you just search for a word, like cats, you will only see cat communities that someone on your server is already subscribed to or already searched for.

The only way it matters is if/when it is defederated by/from other instances.

That being said, some may or may not be more reliable than others, but that's a separate issue

One thing that might not be obvious is that the All feed is different too, as it only shows posts from communities someone on the instance has subscribed to. But since there are ways to search communities across instances, it isn't really a big deal. Unless you're on an instance of one or two people maybe.

Federation and moderation are probably where the instance matters most. Also, the matter of who runs the instance is kind of important considering stability and longevity of the instance. (mine for example will probably be gone within a month once I break something)

Largely, I'd say it depends on the sort of engagement that you're looking for. I went with mine because I'm passionate about FOSS and think that, long-term, it's only sustainable by organizations that do not have a profit motive.

If it goes down you can't get on your regular account, but I made a backup account on another server for when that happens.

I hosted my own for now :3

Quick plug for any "The Big Lebowski" fans, join us at https://lemmy.world/c/achievers@lebowski.social

I don't know, but I keep trying to comment on posts federated from other instances and half the time I get some obscure error and it fails, and it's fucking irritating.

Sometimes syncing of comments/posts in communities between instances can be delayed or missing. I noticed some communities on Lemmy.world would be missing posts if I view them from my Lemmy.ca account.

However, these issues aren't as prevalent for me as they were a month ago. I imagine it's been better after the upgrades.