I joined this one because I just followed the obvious ways to sign up after looking up what Lemmy was about. I didn’t know about instances until I tried to sign in and had to find mine.
Is there a way to mess up making an alt by joining an unfit instance? From what I’ve read, it doesn’t really matter outside of an instance going down and your profile going with it.
Any help is appreciated.
With making an account there.
Well, there’s still the problem of finding an instance ;)
For choosing my own instance, I’ve found this tool very handy: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list .
Click the top of the column for uptime percentage. The ones with 100% are probably a bad idea, because that means they’ve never been updated. Then maybe take a look at where the server is located. If something looks good by these statistics, click the name of the instance to check the server version number. You generally won’t want an instance that lags far behind others in the version number – that indicicates a lazy server admin. It’s also good to read the instance description.
Also, note that this listing currently conflates PieFed and PyLova, even though they are now two separate codebases. They still look and feel about the same because PyLova was forked from PieFed such a short time ago.
Can I use the same email for different instances?
Yes. The two instances are completely separate servers and don’t know about each other. Also, remember to take backups of your data regularly in case that your instance goes down.
Go to Settings, then “Import & Export” and press the “Export” button. You’ll get a file that you can upload to another instance and keep going almost as if nothing had happened.
Oh, that solves the biggest issue for me. I don’t want a bunch of new emails. Thanks.
For the record, I have about 15 accounts (alts) on various instances here. It took me “some” time to find out where I belong 🫣🤣
And when I finally did, I soon noticed I’m trans and that caused my old username to feel kind of “wrong” – a deadname of a kind. So, I had to create new alts and stopped using the old ones. Now I’ve got two alts I use regularly, and a third one I have as backup in case this favourite instance of mine goes belly-up at some point.
There’s an excellent mobile app called Blorp that enables me to be logged into all 15-ish alts at the same time and receive private messages on all of them to what is basically one and the same inbox.
Blorp? I’m assuming that’s an APK download? I don’t see it on Google Play Store.
It’s on F-Droid, at least. F-Droid has a lot of open source apps that Play Store doesn’t have. Their data security tends to be better than those of apps on Play Store, as well, because they don’t send your data to advertisers/spy companies.