Just joined Lemmy today. From what I understand, there are different Lemmy instances that host different communities. I supposed that to interact in a community hosted in a certain instance, I would need to create an account for that instance. Ended up creating 10 different accounts.
Instances talk to all the other instances through federation. You only need one account on one instance- from there you can then go to communities on other instances by linking !community@instance.tld (e.g !memes@sopuli.xyz) and/or looking them up in the Communities tab and interact with those communities from your home instance.
For the most part as highlighted above, yes only one account/instance and you can engage with anything that instance federates with.
However there are already cases where large instances have defederated from others, in which case you will not be able to engage if your local has been defederated from a community you want to access.
For this reason it is a good idea to have multiple, but use one as a primary.
I’ve also found it useful to have multiple to compartmentalize the subjects I subscribe to on each and limit what I see when I am in different “modes”.
Makes it easier to see was is active in communities local to that specific instance too.
I was on beehaw before and didn’t like that losing access to lemmy.world so found lemmy.one. It’s good to diversify.
We don’t have a good sense of which instances are going to be durable long-term yet.
Additionally, If you only have one instamce, you’re signing up for that server’s bespoke curation of the Lemmyverse.
I currently have (I think) 5 accounts spread across Lemmy and Kbin for these reasons.
Thank you very much! I actually found the documentation for Lemmy. It explained and answered all my questions (for the moment). Feeling kinda stupid for posting this; makes me want to delete it 😅.
No need to delete! Someone may appear with the same question and search the instance, and find your post instead of getting lost and giving up hope.