Yeah going forward I'm going to just recommend lemmy.world to people, straight to the point and avoid a lot of the confusion over what instance to pick
I also chose mine because the name (haha funny ArchLinux meme - iusearchlinux.fyi) . But also because it didn't sound like a default instance.
Main reason is, you gotta spread the load, the original purpose of federation is to share the costs so we can keep things affordable and prevent enshittification - not to dump it all on one instance, otherwise we might as well just turn Lemmy into a monolithic structure like Reddit, like YouTube, like Facebook, like Instagram, like Twitter and so on and so forth. We don't want to outgrow donation funding. And we don't want to make one instance "too big to block" lest it starts to enshittify or get greedy and gain too much power over the rest.
In my opinion, no instance should ever be considered the "default" of any federated platform.
While I agree that spreading the load is important, that doesn't make much sense to someone who's new to federation and is possibly coming from reddit where you just join and start commenting. People are automatically searching for a default.