When I was joining ~a month ago the situation was very different
I tried lemmy.one - had some issues joining
I saw beehaw.org - no downvotes - not my jam
I saw lemmygrad.ml - too political for my tastes
I saw sopuli.xyz - most of local posts and server maintenance posts were in language I don’t speak - maybe I can find something fitting me more?
I saw lemmy.world - small but not looking like private, in Europe, so pings should be ok and description seemed fine
I also saw lemmy.ml - seemed like the main instance with the most users - having some understanding of federation from Mastodon migration I decided to spread the load…