The earlier post apparently wasn't clear. I don't mean looking for an instance to join. I was describing the web hosting services that specialize in hosting mastodon instances. So not joining a mastodon instance but creating a new one, etc.
Follow
Setting up a mastodon droplet on Digital Ocean was fairly quick and easy (just took some fiddling w/ email & Amazon S3 settings)
This helped in sussing out the correct S3 bucket policies
I don't recall every tweak I made to the email config, but this helped
https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/new-mailserver-no-mails/3420
@DSmith_Tucson @joshtpm - did you follow any particular set of instructions?