asudox

Whatever your goal is, there most likely is no such instance that satisfies your definition of "freedom of speech". You should run your own instance where you have full control. Since most instances wouldn't federate with such an instance, a relatively cheap VPS will do. Even some old computer you may have lying around.

Mastodon*

I tried using yunohost and some others but they all sucked. I went with just using the bare podman cli

I agree. Revolt is a good alternative to Discord. Matrix does not feel the same as Discord, but just a WhatsApp alternative that is decentralized and federated.

LW's user base accounts for about 36.4% (as of writing this) of all Lemmy users (spread across approximately 570 instances according to FediDB), which is too large.

You will occassionally see some people from other platforms, like mastodon, commenting or posting here. But Lemmy isn't the most compatible one, so you probably won't see microblogs and such. If you want to see microblogs as well, use mbin (kbin fork). It is a mix of Lemmy and Mastodon. You can micro blog and comment on magazines (communities in the mbin/kbin platform) that way.

I especially am thinking of self hosting mbin because I do want to see some microblogs from some users.

Also I welcome you to Lemmy and the Fediverse. Good thing you didn't choose lemmy.world or lemmy.ml

I believe the official instance already got most of the people who would want to use Bluesky in it.

And even if people did start self hosting their own instances, I am not sure if they could handle the traffic.

I wonder if Bluesky will also be like that someday.

Also das werde ich ganz sicher m_f sagen.

Relevant website about the AP extension: https://forgefed.org/

It's called "Mastodon".

Fair. I do like kind Mita and the nerd one, but for me, cappy is still number one. The second one probably would be Mila.

If it isn't cappy, who is it then?