I had no idea how new this instance was when I joined it a few days ago. I picked it semi-randomly because it had a low-ish user count but seemed to be associated with mastodon.world, which seems pretty big, so I figured it must have admins behind it that were experienced with biggish federated instances.
It shows on join-lemmy 80 users/mo now, however that gets calculated. I too just blindly picked but hey happy to help populate a smaller setup. I'm sure the exponential factor will only ramp up from here haha.