First of all: try to let go of your After Effect ways
1st rule of Fusion: don't use the timeline for anything except referencing what you're doing, the theoretical gain is just not worth it.
Since I have no idea what is you're trying to do, it's a bit difficult to help you. So bear with me:
You're saying you want a map location animation, that you want to instance, but my guess is that you need different locations (you can't instance London/Paris/Amsterdam), you also need different positions and different timing, because you don't want everything to pop up at once.
What remains then, that you want to instance?
Almost everything in Fusion can be retimed, reused, conncected and transformed with modifiers, expressions etc.
If you can provide a more detailed description of what you want to do, we can help you better.