@Flaky For single-user/tiny instances, the current ones in the running are GoToSocial and Honk. There's also the WIP R******r project as led by one of the free speech™ instance people.

As for the "good" ones, Misskey and its derivative instances seem to have grown from the neat features and JP origin. Pleroma and variants are lighter on resources than Mastodon (thus a good chunk of instance drama), but I've heard that scaling is where it starts getting tricky to use. Also there was a decent amount of scuffling that really began once it past version 1.0.0 but that's literally 3+ years ago now.

Stepping outside the twitter clone zone, Friendica seems liked by a handful of old people wanting a Facebook clone newer than Diaspora. Bookwyrm seems up my alley as a Goodreads analogue, and I have not interacted with anything related to Lemmy or anything vaguely resembling a messageboard yet.