Don't know any of the public servers. I've been running my own since joining the fediverse.

Tried various pieces of software at the time and most were really bad - bad. Mastodon and Friendica were terrible resource hogs and Mastodon has an insane maintainer. Misskey wasn't really that evolved at the time.

I went with Pleroma and later Soapbox BE (a Pleroma fork), but that has not been updated in ages. It's still ahead of Mastodon, IMO (editable posts quote posting has been there for ages), but I'll probably switch to Akkoma, another Pleroma fork once I have the time. Pleroma is written in Erlang/Elixir, which makes it a nightmare to host.

I prefer Soapbox for frontend.

I don't find the server community that important. I follow people off-server. I dislike the communities that become too masturbatory where half the posts are agreeing with each other how Mastodon is better than Twitter.