Timing of upvotes weighs it I believe. If people like your comment not long after it’s made its considered better than getting first vote an hour later.
In true ____ fashion I haven’t verified this myself.
The transparency in funding and discussion of donations, the country or state it is hosted in (local laws), does its moderation policy align with your values?
If it’s a small instance fewer communities may be federated already so you may need to be the one to manually search for them for the first time (thus adding them to your instance’s “all” feed). Larger instances will already have many communities discovered and a fuller all feed. Though with lemmyverse.net and some determination you can build up the federated communities list up entirely yourself (and give everyone registered there an expanded “all”).
Beehaw initially couldn’t handle the influx of unvetted users with 4 admins so they defederated. It was early days. We may be refederated in the future.