I instance-hopped a couple of times because I joined smaller instances (the recommendation everyone gives you) that then disappeared / were abandoned by the admin.

I already had this problem on PeerTube years earlier, so I played it safe with a bigger instance, at least for a main account (I also had one on gtio.io which was gone before the reddit API exodus). This is absolutely a real issue with people recommending small instances, but at the same time, it’s necessary to avoid recommending just one which gets overwhelmed and disables new accounts.

I joined lemmy through a link my relative sent me and somehow I did not get to select an instance, it seemingly auto-assigned me to lemmy.cafe.

Like spujb said, my guess is the link was directly to lemmy.cafe.

If you want to quickly browse around different instances, there’s https://join-lemmy.org/, which some people have said they avoided because they don’t want people joining the politically-stricter instances as a first impression. So I’d recommend settling in for a week on .cafe to get an idea of how this works, before considering if you’re having no problems with .cafe or if you’d like to explore other options. For example, if they have blocked any communities on other instances which you’re interested in (I don’t know if this is the case).

To be fair, you can’t say they’re wrong.

Most of them are. Some of them are even plain old factually wrong, not just condescending or exaggerating.

It’s important to understand that many of these instances were raised by people who didn’t like reddit’s widespread US-defaultism (including people claiming reddit is left-of-center because it swings Democrat) and its tolerance of bigots and trolls. Now if someone wants to set up their own instances to clone reddit and keep all the bad parts, sure, all we can really do is ignore them or get ignored by them. But when those people complain that this is “a bunch of 14 year olds” with “vote bots” or a “political echo chamber”, that’s just plain old ignorant, or shocked that they’re suddenly in a place with a different culture and struggling to believe it’s mostly just normal nerdy people like reddit is.