I first joined Lemmy.ml and beehaw because when I joined those were pretty much the only active English language instances. I moved to lemmy.ca because Lemmy.ml started going down more when redditors showed up, and I didn’t like beehaw’s “defederate now and sort it out later” attitude. Plus I figured going with a mid sized instance is best. They aren’t going to get overloaded because they are too big, and aren’t going to shut down due to lack of interest either.