Who your admin is. Your admin has a lot of control over the instance. If spez started an instance, I'm fairly confident the entire fediverse community would avoid it.
What the rules are. How strict is the moderation? What are the standards you're supposed to hold yourself to? Some are lax, some are more stringent.
How popular is your instance? In general, less popular = better. You're gonna see the big recommended instances buckle and error over the course of the day. I'm kinda guilty of this, being on sh.itjust.works, but if it gets too bad I'll probably make myself a temporary account on another instance temporarily. I really like how @theDude@sh.itjust.works is organizing stuff and I want the community to succeed. If that means reducing the load for a bit, I'll happily do it.

[–] SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Still testing Sopuli. What do you know about it?

[–] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Not a gigantic amount, tbh. I took a quick look at the post & comment history of your admins (@QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz and @Ninmi@sopuli.xyz), they seem like cool people. The rules seem reasonable. No red flags that I can spot on a cursory poke around.

[–] Silviecat44@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sometimes if the instance creator has certain restrictions (rare). Also it affects what posts show up in the "Local" tab (posts from communities that are hosted on that instance). In the "Communities" tab it will show communities that people on your instance are subscribed to. If your instance goes down, you will lose your account I think.

Most of the time your home instance does not matter