Do I need to have an account on a specific instance to create/moderate a community there?
Assuming this is the case, what instances would you recommend? My home instance doesn’t allow community creation and I don’t necessarily want to pile everything on lemmy.world. Decentralization and all that.
You could ask the instance owner to create the community and volunteer to mod it or approach an admin of a instance that has communities in a similar vein
I’m open to hosting communities that align with my instance - not necessarily NZ based
You're right. The only way would be to create an account on that instance then appoint your other profile as a moderator. Maybe you can resign as moderator on the second account but I'm not 100% sure on that one, and it may not even be necessary.