After spending a few days learning about lemmy and other fediverse websites, I was curious about people's processes for picking a server that is right for them. I've seen most posts say to pick one that is not too big or small and that has similar interests as yourself. But if we are all mostly federated, doesn't it make the most sense to join the biggest or likeliest server to stay around and federated with the most other servers? Then you can just travel to the instances you share interests in. I chose this instance because you could just sign up and be in it, and that was all I needed to check things out. And although I found many communities in other instances, even if let's say all of my subscribed communities are on other instances, doesn't it make sense to just stay here so long as they are federated with sh.itjust.works? It may be too early to know for sure, but it seems like this instance is going to stick around for the foreseeable future, why risk joining the smaller instances that might not be here for long. Also, if you have subscribed communities in several instances, I assume you have to follow all the different server's rules. I'd be curious to hear other people's thoughts in regards to picking a home instance.
Edit: Are there any restrictions to interacting with communities on other instances?
Honestly for the new user thinking to join just picking something, anything is all that matters.
Each user has very little content on here right now, so if for some reason they don't like the way things are run on the one they chose they can easily choose a different one without losing much. Profile migration (i.e. copy all your stuff to a different lemmy server) is also something coming that I'm looking forward to.
As a sh.itjust.works user you can see almost anything in this network of websites (500+ servers) except lemmygrad and beehaw. Also the server admin here is pretty cool and seems to know what he's doing, so I'm pretty smitten with my choice.
As far as the likelihood of a server going down, that's hard to say as you have no real way of knowing one will be more reliable than another at first glance. TBH I think the smaller servers in the network have the advantage here, their costs to run the server are lower since they have fewer users and less traffic. If they have the creation of new communities turned off, the space required is far less than otherwise. The main detractor with tiny servers is easily discovering whats on other servers. That's a longer explanation why that is, but it's like that and I've gone on too long already.
My main worry with smaller servers is that whoever is running them may lose interest and decide to shut down permanently. It does seem that the pros and cons tip in either direction as a server's population grows.
I get that worry, but I honestly can't say that I think a small server with little interest is more likely to shut down than a server with huge interest (and it's associated hosting bills). For ex. I'm panning on deploying my own lemmy instance soon, it's going to have signups turned off, but if I left them on I wouldn't really care how popular my server is. The less the better imo because it becomes cheap enough for me to forget I'm admining it until update time comes around and fewer interpersonal issues to deal with because fewer users. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but becoming a huge server with a lot of users doesn't appeal to me like at all, and having a small user base is only upsides. Once I deploy it's going to be running for a long time.
Edit: I should have asked if you meant user interest or low admin interest
I was referring to low admin interest. For example if you did allow a few users on your server, then you grew bored of it and shut it down, they would lose access to their accounts. But running a server just for yourself honestly sounds like the best option if you have the money for it.
I guess I just can't see the connection between a server being small and how that could make you more likely to lose interest in running it. Maybe there's something to be said about a large instance's duties to its users, but I don't have any reason to think an admin of a particular instance won't shut it down from over-taxing their pocket book, or just not wanting to deal with the thousands of user issues a large instance will bring over a smaller one. I'm not trying to change your mind or anything, that's just how I see it.
If you're technically inclined it can be super cheap. I'm paying $6 / mo for a VPS that's way more than capable of running a single user instance and I get to host a lot of other things on it as well. See here, though not all are on the VPS in question.