Front page side bar usually shows rules. The others there is no simple way to find out in advance.
My point was that it DOES matter where you create your account, beyond just getting a name you like. So I expect many people will hop around from instance to instance until they find "home".
My fear is that an instance I join could fold and lose my history and name. I believe we'll probably see a feature that allows migration in the future, but it seems the best solution now is to roll your own.
Same. I think this might also be one of the reasons people join larger instances (besides not knowing where to go). At least it was like that for me. I really hope we see that feature sooner than later. Maybe I'll try setting up my own instance when I have enough time to figure out how that works.
There's one thing you might want to take into account and that's whether the instance accepts nsfw content or not. From the large ones, only lemmy.ml will refuse to show you nsfw.
Also, don't choose an instance that's so problematic that it is blocked by all other instances.
Was one of the reasons I picked the server I’m on.
The downside is if you are the first person on that server to subscribe to a community then the syncing of the posts and comments starts when you subscribe. So you might not get to see older content.
This is not really a big deal and you can always go to the originating server that hosts a community to read old stuff.