I’m looking for the same things as you. An instance that isn’t part of the big instance fights, mostly leaves it to the user to block instances/communities (except for the illegal ones of course), uses the latest version of lemmy, and defederates from Threads. So far lemmy.zip seems to fit the bill. I’ve also been looking at infosec.pub (because my work aligns with it) and lemmy.cafe, but both are defederated with .ml, which I only wish to see because there are a lot of active non-political communities hosted there.