>>778715Well I self-host, but I've seen quite a few english speaking artists denden.world and meow.social, and a lot of japanese artists on misskey.io and kemokemo.org. Seems like a lot of popular artists from twitter (coldbloodedtwilight, kekitopu, etc…) moved to baraag, which I wouldn't recommend moving to as a user because of the lolisho stuff, but it's worth least federating with it if you're self-hosting.
I mostly just use fedi as an art gallery so I haven't looked to much at other kinds of instance, but people on art instances tend to talk about other stuff too.
I'd say what makes or breaks an instance is it's rules, so self-hosting is optimal if you have the skillset for it.