@roodleypoodley Different instances are created for different reasons. A few of them are based on specific interests but I find that to be a bad reason to pick an instance since there are lists that can serve that purpose better.

Usually instances differ in their moderation policy which IMO is the best reason to select an instance. Instances can silence or even ban whole instances. Which means users on that instance cant see or follow people from banned instances. Of course instances also can choose who to ban on their own instance.

Many instances int he fediverse are relatively quick to ban based on things like expressing right or left leaning political views, for example. This instance is a free speech zone which means if two people disagree we prefer them to silence each other. Luckily we havent seen any racism or strong prejudice here, so serious issues have never been a problem. We will ban in extreme cases in theory but its never happened. That is one thing that makes QOTO unique as the vast majority of servers have very strict rules and ban much more easily.

We are also unique in that we offer a lot of out own servers and customization. For example the user interface your seeing now is completely custom and unique to QOTO, as is our large text limits and several other features like how images are rendered.

Also these servers we run:
https://video.qoto.org
https://cloud.qoto.org