Edit: thanks everyone for the suggestions!
Do keep them coming as it might be helpful for others who come across this, since it seems quite a few users are (understandably) bleeding from lemmy.world these days, like myself

I was looking for a solid instance to move to, but I'm getting burned out from trying to find the perfect instance that:

• is based in a country with reasonable privacy reputation (if it still fits the bill, outside Europe too is fine)
• allows creating communities without admin approval (I'm willing to try getting into one of those too if needed, hopefully it would be accepting of creating niche communities though)
• doesn't defederate indiscriminately

The tool I used is lemmyverse.net but it seems the filtering isn't working great, or I just don't understand it, e.g. I filter by Italian language and the only Italian instance I know (feddit.it) doesn't show up, while a slew of irrelevant ones is listed (Lemmy Português is there??)

Sorry if I sound so needy, maybe I'm just overthinking it, since posts are public and indexable by anyone. Do say so, if I should chill out and just pick one of the usual ones like lemm.ee etc.

P.S. I would love to self-host, but I'm currently not able to either, I don't have enough technical expertise.