I am not new to having a handful of alts. I had a handful back in Reddit. But my journey here has been entertainingly different:
- my lemmy world account is where I started. I was fresh off the boat (from Reddit). I wanted a Reddit-like experience and I got it.
- kbin was more out of curiosity, I checked it out and was immediately disoriented. I still liked what I saw, and hoped it’d develop further.
- my lemm.ee account was more out of necessity. It was created during the lemmy world outages, and was meant as a lifeboat. @sunaurus@lemm.ee’s transparency and even-keeled decision-making during the Facebook/Meta Threads debacle won me over. It has since been my main.
- my dbzer0 account was born when lemmy world took action against certain communities. I was struck by dbzer0’s principles. It became my go-to alt for tech and tech-adjacent interests.
- Of course I have an NSFW alt, which I shall never name. I’m pretty vanilla, but…
- I explored what piefed.social is all about and made an account there. It reminded me of kbin for some reason.
- And then this one. I still hope this is the last time I’d ever have to make an alt.
To think that when I made my lemm.ee acount, I was so against the idea of having too many alts. I now have seven!
To me, it’s mostly how an instance is ran. How it makes its decisions: defederating or not, and with whom, how they handle complaints, how they handle bans, etc. makes a difference in both the communities it hosts and its members.
There’s also the matter of user culture. Some instances, like Beehaw, Lemmygrad, and Hexbear are known for a certain user culture. Some users might steer clear away from certain instances because of that perceived user culture.
And then there’s the issue of defederation stance. It might not be readily apparent, or affect your user experience in a big way, but for some users, it’s a factor. This is also where lemm.ee made its mark. It basically used defederation as a last resort, and some users were drawn to that.