I shouldn't start with Mastodon, installing it is rather tedious.
Pleroma is easy to install, and I guess Rebased/Soapbox is too, considering that the latter is a fork of Pleroma.
And by this, Akkoma should be easy to install too, but that one is so full of bugs, I don't think you'll like it.
GNU Social is easy to install, but requires the already EOL PHP 7.4, and it's quite different from the other big softs.
Then there's GoToSocial and honk. for single user only instances, which is really just a matter of dropping it onto a server, run it in the background, and you're done, but GoToSocial is alpha quality software according to their developers, and honk. feels like you're behind a prison with no connection to the outside world at all.