Is also worth noting that it’s not just the moderation practices of your instance that affects your experience, it’s also how other instances perceive your instance. Hexbear, for example, is an instance filled with “tankies” and a lot of other fediverse instances don’t agree with them or their values and choose to defederate from them. So a Hexbear user, while they might personally like their own instance’s moderation and values, will not see any content from instances that have defederated with Hexbear, which could impact their experience enough that they’d rather move instance.

(Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comment from a Hexbear user that I’ve loved. And I’ve definitely personally blocked several of their communities from showing in my feed.)

In the past, I know some instances defederated from lemmy.world because it was seen as kind of spammy. Some of them re-federated after lemmy.world tightened up its moderation, but I don’t know of all of them did. (I’m not a lemmy user so it doesn’t affect me personally and therefore I don’t keep too much track of it.)

Inter-instance politics aren’t necessarily a thing you need to be hyper-aware of, but they can definitely shape your experience.