It's a platform still in its infancy but improving rapidly, social.photo is a pretty good one if you want a smaller instance, it's hosted by the admin over at discuss.online. I'm not a member of discuss.online but I can vouch that @jgrim@discuss.online is an awesome sysadmin and I have full faith in him maintaining that instance long term (if you're ever worried of signing up to a small instance and it disappearing.. I highly doubt his stuff will.). Currently migration isn't added into pixelfed yet (its being worked on though) but I am gonna sign up to that one anyway, it's always best to spread around the federation.

Might be worth reaching out to lemmy.ca admins though and seeing if they have one spun up or would be willing to as well.