Here‘s a list of Sharkey instances (not including blahaj.zone for some reason) and Akkoma instances. Where were you looking to find nothing?

Akkoma only has two instances and they are both down

That's because Akkoma's official website is silly and only recommends two random small instances with no promises on reliability and stuff. Like, Mastodon at least asks their recommended instances to have at least 3 people responsible for their server.

But, aside from that glaring flaw, I absolutely adore Akkoma and it's my favorite window to the microblogging fedi. If you want to check it out, I can recommend void.lgbt and fedi.absturztau.be - I used the former in the past and I got an account on the latter recently.

Sharkey is a Misskey fork and there don’t seem to be any instances.

There are plenty of Sharkey instances and another person already shared a link with them. blahaj.zone is one you might find familiar because it's run by the same people who run lemmy.blahaj.zone. There is a notable detail about sharkey instances though - it seems like most of them are very queer-focused. This is quite different from Mastodon and Lemmy.

To top it off, they all require approval. That is one of my biggest pet peeves with “public” software: requiring a login to even evaluate it.

Fortunately, Sharkey instances let you check out the local feed without logging-in. I think some instances hide it though.

Wafrn looks kinda interesting. It does require clicking to see every layer of responses and the entire thread isn’t shown like in lemmy, but maybe that’s configurable.

Wafrn has its' strangeness because it's a Tumblr-like, not a Twitter-like. I respect that but a lot of tumblr-isms are a bit annoying. Like, maybe don't lump responses and boosts together so I know how many actual responses this post had?

Akkoma only has two instances and they are both down

Try Fediverse Observer and FediDB, have some more.

Sharkey is a Misskey fork and there don’t seem to be any instances.

Again, try Fediverse Observer and FediDB.