Edit: I do love mindly.social for a more laid back/be nice overall sentiment. Although this week I decided to move back to mastodon.social because of the comments/replies thing I mentioned in my other comment here
I went for fosstodon.org, as I think this suits my interests well enough, but there are other general or broad topic instances out there.
And the second thing is the type of instances that are blocking mastodon.social: based on what I usually see going on on mastodon and lemmy, they are probably instances focusing heavily of LGBTQ+ or other marginalized communities. So unless that's the most important thing to you, you won't miss it.
quick note: those communities can be REALLY annoying sometimes. I remember seeing people mentioned that they got jumped in because they posted food pics without content warning, in an instance about.... food and cooking. So, if instances like this are blocking mastodon.social... go ahead