More additional thoughts because the explanation above also may help you understand one point of conflict that never seems to go away: peoples confusion about instances.
I used to think that choosing an instance was like choosing an email provider. Others will say that it's also like choosing forums to join, and nobody had trouble with that either. The truth is, though, that it's both in the worst possible way.
This part of the fediverse is focused on microblogging. Like i said, microblogging in its current form has no concept for communities because everything goes into a global scope.
We like to say that instances on the fediverse are communities, and at the first glance that makes sense. They have a theme, rules and standards, a staff to enforce them, and a join process. It's the same as forums, right?
But instances are also federated, and this leads to the lines becoming blurred. So blurred, in fact, that it's hard to see any difference between them. Same as with alts, you can interact with the network and the experience will mostly be the same. The only difference is what parts of the network are inaccessible due to moderation and maybe a custom UI (if the user even sticks with the web UI).
Is this enough to create a sense of community? I don't think so.
Communities are formed around a shared interest, with members talking about it, sharing their own works, holding events, etc. How could instances possibly be neat units of communities when all of these acts happen across the boundaries? Personally, I never felt intrinsically closer with anyone just because we were on the same instance.
It's easy to choose an instance on a purely mechanical level. You open one, register, done. It's no different from other platforms and this isn't the part that makes people struggle. It's the lack of a clear point of instances in the first place. They're first and foremost a vehicle to drive decentralization, but are presented as communities, leading to clashing expectations and behaviors. This is where the confusion comes from.
This doesn't mean that instances are bad or pointless. The mistake the fediverse made was adopting the instance = community concept without ever adjusting the microblogging design to represent them as such.
Volpeon