Servers are federated by default so unless it has been defederated by big instances you will have no problems. Important thing is instance you are joining having captcha/email verification because the ones without is suspectible to bot sign ups. So big instance might defederate with them to prevent bot attacks
You can click the “use map” button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can’t find a instance that you like that is close don’t worry. Because server closeness doesn’t matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.
Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as “preferably”
Currently Lemmy doesn’t support account migrating but it is technically possible afaik. It might get added in future but currently you have to sing up from sracth. Hovewer I would say having a Lemmy.world account in addition is probably a good call.
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
I mean most of the “Reddit content” on Lemmy is thing that get posted to Reddit from other sites anyway. I don’t think the reddit vibe has existed except the same tired comments for a long time now