I've had limited experience with Akkoma and I personally love the early 2000s aesthetic, it's also more feature complete and transparent to the end user than Mastodon (also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives). I also experimented with Mastodon and noticed that whatever I posted on the akkoma instance couldn't be seen while browsing from the mastodon instance: mastodon doesn't "discover" akkoma content and won't show anything unless you're following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

I might give it another try, look for a specific instance focused on something I'm interested in, even if just slightly, and try to blend in, instead of being the weird antisocial dude in the corner. No promises, tho.