It depends what you are looking for. dbzer0.com I see a lot so remaining there is an option too. lemm.ee is similar in not wanting to defederate from anything, and damn if they don't mean it so like they don't even block lemmygrad.ml like virtually every other instance across the Fediverse.

Or go with a theme - StarTrek.website, programming.dev, etc. Or location.

If you want to block all 3 of the most toxic instances including lemmy.ml, there are only 2 that I have heard of that do so: dubvee.org and Lemmy.cafe. I may switch to one of those myself even.:-) The latter is pure Lemmy while the former runs an alternative UI (Tesseract) geared for streamlined multimedia, and may one day also run the Sublinks backend rather than Lemmy, though that doesn't seem ready.

Other thoughts include PieFed and Mbin, which you should at least check out before deciding. The latter combines the ability to look at Lemmy and also Mastodon with the same account / on the same instance. PieFed is more a Lemmy replacement, with a variety of other goodies like Pixelfed (a "Decentralized photo sharing social media" platform) that tie in to it, and they are about to release a short video hosting service as well.

Sorry if this is too much - at least it's so fucking cool to have it many awesome options to choose from! As excessive capitalism enshittifies everything for the sake of pure profiteering, the plethora of free and open source alternatives is a great sign for the future!:-)

i totally get that, although being able to resub to all the same categories beats starting from scratch entirely somewhere else. my experience at fedia.io has been great so far

Well, he's on fedia.io, so I assume that he recommends that.

Keep in mind that that's an mbin instance. It has a different UI (much of which, though not all of which, I like), but last I looked, which was some time back, didn't have mobile client support other than a PWA. That may or may not be significant to you, depending upon your usage. It also has native support for Mastodon-style microblogging.

Your home instance is a lemmy instance, so it'll look and work somewhat-differently.

My main irritation with the mbin UI last I looked was the difficulty of bringing up the subscriptions list. On the other hand, it did a collection of other things that I liked that lemmy presently does not, like permitting resizing inline images.

kbin has a few extra bells and whistles, like it can also do mastodon-style "microblogging" and custom themes per user. it's since ceased developement but mbin is a fork continuing it. other than that, the experience is the same