One annoying thing I have realized is that while a small instance is unlikely to be defederated from anyone thus giving you the most access to the fed, you have to "unlock" a lot of communities by searching for them as they are not seen before anyone attempts to interact with them. Then again if it did do it automatically I would have to filter out loli by community which would be even more annoying.
So there's the hidden downside to something that seemingly only has upsides at a surface level.