I wanted originally to join one of the big ones, but figured that I should distribute the load by going for a smaller instance. I was scrolling through a list of instances and saw the logo and the name. I was already vaguely familiar with solarpunk, so I chose it because it appeals to me (environmental awareness, anarchism, optimism, DIY, upcycling, pragmatism and so on). To be completely honest, I had no idea what “choosing a home instance” entailed at the time.
Pretty happy with the decision though, it’s a themed instance so locally I get stuff you’d expect, and when browsing all I mostly see stuff from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml and the rest.
Not a particularly interesting story, but nevertheless here it is.