seemed like a genuine nice guy

He indeed is, on top of truly knowing what he's doing.

My reason for being here is, while checking other instances, I saw a post by lemmy.ml admins saying they were overloaded by the influx of new people.

Since they had 1k people, I thought max 500 could be a good number (lemmy.world was a bit less than 500 when I joined).

I checked small instances and this one gave me really good vibes, more than the others, so here I am and I couldn't be happier about it :)

Same thing for me. I have my own biases, but I kinda expect to be exposed to things I don't agree sometimes: knowledge is good and trying to understand other viewpoints is useful (even if to know how someone could get something so wrong).

lemmy.world provides me that, I can engage with content I clearly enjoy, and debate (in a civil way) about things I disagree. And if something is really egregious I can block it myself.

Is there a way I can view which instances are defederated?

I don't mind/am glad not seeing self harm stuff and CSAM content, but if this instance is disconnecting from piracy and hacking related content I'd like to be aware of that.

Here here!