I have joined several instances and all have their pros and cons, but I’ll plug the most recent one (lemmings.world) because it checked all of these boxes for me:
- Federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org
- Not federated with certain more problematic instances
- Stable/good uptime record
- Upvotes/downvotes, community creation and image uploads enabled
- I liked the name
This was my exact trajectory and reasoning, but I ended up adding lemmings.world after that. 😅