Go instance shopping. Yeah you’re creating accounts on instances you may not use, but creating an account for a test drive is acceptable I think. I tried five instances before I found one I liked. My runner up I use as a backup in case my primary goes down for some reason.
First I narrowed down candidates to those that are regionally close to me. You can sort instance location by going to the-federation.info/platform/73. Further down the page you’ll see a listing of all nodes (instances). You click on the location header to sort them by country.
Then you want to look at user numbers. Too big and the instance could have overload issues. Too small and the instance may not be well established and reliable. So medium on the user counts.
Then I did a “ping” on ones that looked good to see how they do on network response.
Once I found good candidates, I created an account on each and gave it a test drive. You can see who won for me.