And now all we need is a mom's spaghetti reference to make all the Redditugees feel at home

TBH I think Lemmy.world is the best instance to default to. It's a large, well supported instance. It has open registration (many large instance require your account to be manually approved), and it's a general instance (not targeting any specific region, hobby/interest, or theme).

After you've been around a while you'll get a better idea of whether a more niche instance is right for you, and can make a new account at that point.

Its just been really unstable, getting ddos attacked all the time.

It was really unstable during the first big reddit abandonment.