Imo, that doesn't work in practice. You can join an instance that looks decent, and have the whole thing cut off from the network because a few bad actors gave your instance a bad rep, or because it's in the wrong political block, or because your admin decided to throw a fit about one of the instances you want to interact with.
Functionally you end up stuck in some narrowly scoped insular community, large swathes of-which you could be cut off from without much prior notice.
Everytime you join an instance, you're rolling the dice on the quality and breadth of your experience.
The alternative is the overhead of running your own instance, which seems to be the route taken by most of the people I know who use Mastodon, and recommend it.
Functionally you end up stuck in some narrowly scoped insular community, large swathes of-which you could be cut off from without much prior notice.
Everytime you join an instance, you're rolling the dice on the quality and breadth of your experience.
The alternative is the overhead of running your own instance, which seems to be the route taken by most of the people I know who use Mastodon, and recommend it.