I’ve played a good bit of FTL and never felt like I knew what I was doing.

I actually noticed recently that it’s no longer maintained so I’ll have to find another desktop solution.

For me at least jerboa isn’t really functional for searching for new communities, let alone instances. You’re better off in your mobile browser. And even then you’ll only find instances that are already federated with your home instance (meaning someone on you home instance will have had to search and subscribe to one of the communities on the instance you’re trying to find). Your best bet for finding instances is actually outside websites like https://join-lemmy.org/instances or other websites dedicated to listing and sorting instances.

On desktop I use Tildes. It’s fairly minimalistic in terms of features, but very smooth and attractive UI. It does what I need with no headaches and looks great doing it. Like many others here I use AntennaPod on mobile.

This is fixed on the new version of the app! You can get it on F-droid with the IzzyOnDroid repo, or build it directly with Obtainium