I think you have the right idea. An large instance may help in the first day or two until you find some people to follow and then it's not so important as far a

I think you have the right idea. An large instance may help in the first day or two until you find some people to follow and then it's not so important as far as seeing the rest of the world. The federated timeline has plenty and it will keep growing as the number of people on the instance and the number of people they follow grows. You can also search hashtags to follow topics across the fediverse. But it's nice to have that community with some core shared interests to come back to. Part of that is a shared code of conduct. You want to associate with people who have the same idea about how to interact with others and that really sets the tone for the whole experience. I've mostly interacted with fosstodon.org and hachyderm.io and both are made up of people who are positive and respectful of others.