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I'm on the generic mastodon.social but I don't understand how these topic-specific instances are supposed to work, unless emacs is literally your highest priority in life. Is the idea that you'd have a separate mastodon account for every topic you're interested in?
Small topics instances (like emacs.ch) are cozy to join. They are a collaborative filter to focus exploration on a part of the fediverse. The local timeline will be not just about emacs, but has more likely programming posts than, say, clam biology (hashtag clamfacts, if you're interested).

So your post about keyboard layouts or databases will more likely be discovered/boosted (even if you have no followers on other instances), because the local timeline and hashtags are more quiet than when you're on a general instance (where your posts drown in the noise). Or compared to, say, sauropods.win, were you more likely reach a geologist than a database admin.

Generally I like to be on two or three instances, so my art doodles go to mastodon.art rather than a tech instance (flooded with AI art). I like to check the local timeline or discovery page of other topic-instances via web occasionally, maybe follow someone there to peek into another bubble. The big instances like mastodon.social are just too much, flooded with random stuff I don't care about.

The idea (AFAICT) is that you follow/subscribe people on any instance from your account on your primary instance. This works, but the UX is terrible right now, you have to copy the users full handle (name@instance) and paste it into the follow dialogue on your primary instance.
That all works perfectly fine IMHO, what I don't understand is why I'd make my account on an Emacs-focused instance unless literally all I ever wanted to talk about in life was Emacs!

I could have five different accounts on five different instances on topics I'm interested in, but then which one do I log into if I just want to read my overall feed? I guess I'd have one primary account, and then I'd log into my secondary account on the paperclips instance when I wanted to toot about paperclips, but this is the point where the UX seems awfully complicated.

> what I don't understand is why I'd make my account on an Emacs-focused instance unless literally all I ever wanted to talk about in life was Emacs!

Talking on a social network on the Internet is not the same as talking in real life. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon recognizes this.

Maybe all you want to talk about on the Internet is Emacs. Maybe you want to keep your "Emacs nerd" persona totally separate from your "classical music afficionado" persona. Maybe you are part of a group of Emacs committers who want a casual place to hang out.

There are no restrictions on what you talk about [1] on any instance, either technically or socially. Plenty of people just join a random instance associated with some topic, and then are friends with people on other instances. They never look at the instance feed, only at their timeline.

Outside of the small hassle of adding people, there are no real downsides to joining a random instance.

[1] Outside of super controversial or illegal topics.

I imagine you are overthinking the problem here.

It's all about choice.

Mastodon and/or emacs.ch is the way to go. I posted something over there recently and got a lot more traction than I ever did by posting on my blog and on Reddit.