The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance. I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and

The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance. I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally. Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc. Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.