@feditips It is really hard to assess the reliability of servers. The first I signed on had been running for few years, had the covenant, had very sensible and agreeable rules. And a month after I found out the administrator had been having heated arguments for a while and suddenly just removed the covenant and rules and announced the instance will be shut down in a few weeks.
I don't blame people choosing the largest ones because they don't know about or can't make sense of the alternatives. It's like the early days of webmail, when I had to make a new account yearly because the previous one shut down. Except now migrating is a lot bigger deal because there's more value in the content you're leaving behind and you have shared the account to more places.