The federated all feed will have more diversity. Knowing that, it becomes more important on a small instance to use things like lemmyverse.net to search out new communities to subscribe to, because they may not appear in your feed otherwise (unless the server owner uses a bot to subscribe to a bunch of communities). They are also more variable, how well they run is based on the technical knowledge of the admin and the type of hardware they’re running on. However, when built well small instances will usually run a bit faster, be a bit more stable, and have a more close-knit community. Knowing all of that, I think which is better just depends on the priorities of the user. However, as a note, spreading the load over as many instances as possible increases redundancy and makes Lemmy more sustainable, so if you’re on the fence I would say to join a small instance.
The federated all feed will have more diversity. Knowing that, it becomes more important on a small instance to use things like lemmyverse.net to search out new communities to subscribe to, because they may not appear in your feed otherwise (unless the server owner uses a bot to subscribe to a bunch of communities). They are also more variable, how well they run is based on the technical knowledge of the admin and the type of hardware they’re running on. However, when built well small instances will usually run a bit faster, be a bit more stable, and have a more close-knit community. Knowing all of that, I think which is better just depends on the priorities of the user. However, as a note, spreading the load over as many instances as possible increases redundancy and makes Lemmy more sustainable, so if you’re on the fence I would say to join a small instance.