quick summary of the most notable instances i’ve read about:
lemmy.ml is run by pro-china folks. there’s some drama surrounding that. it is defederated (fully or partially) from some other instances.
lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance. if you want to find something reddit-like, this would probably be the first place to try.
beehaw is a much more private instance that only has a few moderators but has stricter standards on being nice to one another. it ended up having to defederate with lemmy.world early on because it couldn’t handle the moderation load from too much content.
kbin.social happened to pick up a lot of tech type folks for some reason. it was just a side project from one dev so it was not as polished at first and barely survived the incoming users but it’s in a good place now. he’s got a few folks helping him so the future looks bright to me at least.
I didn’t choose bink because that name is already occupied in my head by http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm