I’ve heard people talking about e.g. not subscribing to lemmy.world communities (because they are the largest instance), and others like Lemmygrad seems to be defederated by quite many instances. But what about lemmy.ml? Should that instance and those communities also be avoided? The “issue” is that many large communities seem to be based on that instance. Like [email protected] and [email protected]
In circumstances where similar communities exist on multiple instances, I would subscribe to all of them at first—but pay attention to differences in moderation and community norms, and unsubscribe from communities you’re less comfortable with. I wouldn’t judge a community on the basis of its instance without trying it first, unless the instance admins have unusual rules they’re imposing on all their communities.