Security through obscurity is no security at all. You’ve fallen for the marketing if you think apple cares about your privacy any more than any other big tech company.
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 mobile I use bromite-buildtools maintained by Uazo on github. I’ve read they were involved with bromite when it was still actively maintained and have been continuing to improve it and keep it up to date with chromium upstream. I use Obtainium to keep it updated since it’s not on fdroid or Izzy.
https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools
On desktop I keep it simple with FF and ublock
I’ve played a good bit of FTL and never felt like I knew what I was doing.