I had a similar issue, but I didn’t dig quite so deep as you did. Basically I couldn’t find any good instances, in fact the ones I could find were one with just a single anti-vax conspiracy theorist, and then the next one had Alex Jones and Steven Crowder. Like no shit I immediately stumbled on the archdemon instance.
After that I kind of just got a bit skeeved out by it and stopped looking. One thing I found really frustrating was that I couldn’t find any way to look at the networks like I could with lemmy. I think there needs to be a better way in general to view federation status between activitypub instances, because it’s really invisible at the moment. Particularly I want to be able to see the pariah instances, and things like… idk… have they defederated from the archdemon instance? That sort of thing is important to me.
Also loads of them weren’t available to sign up as a creator, so that’s yet another barrier. I’m still looking for good ones but I’m not ready to dedicate real time to it just yet.