For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.

Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what's coming up in the future, while it's just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like "searching" for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy... - for early adopters though, it's almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).

There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)