Sure thing.

I just went through the instances listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances and visited each one that caught my eye and I’d just glance over the welcome message, rules, and check to see if they have a website or a Matrix Space where you can talk with the admins, get support or just chat. Eventually I found one that’s hosted in my country, is better aligned with my interests (browse the list of local communities!), has no moderation rules that I disagree with, and is being maintained by folks who are passionate about FOSS and whom I wouldn’t mind supporting in maintaining the instance (financially or otherwise). Most instances will have one community where people can ask for help or discuss anything related to the instance itself, like the state of the server and updates, whether or not the instance should defederate from some other instance, etc… For example, ours is https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/tchncs and lemmy.world’s is https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld. Be sure to take a look at those “home” communities as well.

If it’s a smaller instance, it would also be a good idea to check the state of funding. Are they getting enough donations to maintain the server already? If not, would you be willing to help them out? Then just create an account and test the stability of the server for a week or so. This may sound like quite a bit of effort, and it is, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I love that I’ve stumbled upon this community https://tchncs.de/ and I’ve already switched to using their servers for a bunch of other stuff I’m using (Matrix, for example).

Edit: Forgot to mention you might also want to check the list of blocked instances (desktop website: scroll down to the bottom and on the right you will see “instances”) just to get an idea of the admins’ mindset and whether or not you agree with what they are blocking/allowing (I strongly advise not to actually check out those blocked instances; the names alone should tell you enough).