My home instance, Lemmy.sdf.org, is full of geeky/retro communities that tickle my fancy. I like setting my view to "local" to see what pops up locally, even in communities I'm not a member of.

I'm also a member of feddit.uk, which focuses on UK stuff. That's handy for folks in the UK because it's easier to find locally-relevant stuff.

It's federated, so yeah - you can interact with the fediverse from any federated node

The node you call home matters though. You'll run into your local users more, you'll come across certain communities more.

The experience is very different. Use multiple accounts, but find a home

I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance's sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that's what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.

So, I’m new here, but I’m still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances.

One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I'm not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.

I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It's a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we're focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they're a part of. That's the major advantage as far as I see it.

I don't care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.