The nice thing with these instances is content discovery (easy to find more communities about a single topic), but there’s a downside as well: they create a lot of centralization in Lemmy.

If you’re mostly on Lemmy for a specific topic, and one instance has consolidated almost all discussion around that topic, then your entire Lemmy experience is controlled by a single instance. In other words, despite the whole network being decentralized, users in such situations are still getting effectively the same kind of downsides they would get on something like Reddit.

I think lemm.ee is the most friendly instance name

You can always just make a fresh account (and don’t tell anybody)

Respectfully I would disagree with part of your message. It sounds a bit like you’re encouraging some degree of instance tribalism, but the whole beauty of Lemmy is that I can be a regular and full member of !something@lemmy.ca with my @lemm.ee account.

For new members, I would have the opposite advice: don’t pay too much attention to what instance a specific community is on. Just treat each community as its own entity and each person as an individual.

The reason I bring this up is that I think useless instance tribalism can be a real issue on Lemmy sometimes. I have seen statements too often along the lines of “oh you have an account on <instance>, so I will just ignore you”.