You're overthinking it. Find an instance that seems friendly and sign up. If it turns out you don't like it there, you can migrate to another one; barring defederation issues, everyone who is following you on the old instance will follow you on the new one automatically. Unfortunately the list of people that you follow isn't automatically migrated, but some front ends reduce the pain of this by letting you export a list of follow-ees on the old instance and then import it on the new one.
Just do it!