I currently have 3 - one here, one on sh.itjust.works, and one on kbin.social. I did this for a couple of reasons:

1. If something happens to one instance, especially during growing pains where user influx is indistinguishable from a DDOS, I’ve got a “backup” where I can still be active from.

2. These three (and beehaw, but I’m still waiting for approval over there) seem to be the larger (and/or fastest growing) instances - currently there’s an issue with Lemmy where if you “click-through” to a community on another instance, the authentication doesn’t carry - so you have to copy the link, return to your “home instance” and search for the link, then you can visit via your home instance and interact. Clumsy (but hopefully corrected eventually). By having an account already on these instances, clicking through isn’t a problem because I’ve got an account over there. (Note: I’m not talking about interacting with posts across instances, that works fine).

3. Kbin.social showed me that instances can have a different “look-and-feel” from each other. While Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, and beehaw are all clones of each other, Kbin has a prettier UX. Until apps start showing up, the homepage of your chosen instance is how Lemmy will look for you across the fediverse.

4. Different instances have different home feeds, for some reason. I would expect that all settings being equal (view from all instead of local, or view subscribed and having the same subscriptions on each instance) they should all return a similar feed - but they don’t. Not sure why, if my understanding about how this all aggregates together works - I’m still testing.

5. Different instances have different philosophies and different rules - some allow porn (but most don’t, and even on the ones that do I haven’t seen any yet - and yes I have NSFW enabled). But I also don’t want to end up with a home-instance that’s another echo chamber of one certain point of view - and while communities from those instances can be filtered individually, it’d be nice to have a local instance that’s already not an echo chamber.

6. It’s still early enough that I’m not “married” to a particular instance yet, so now is the time to experiment and test. And since there’s no way (yet) to migrate an account, settings, subscriptions from one instance to another, now’s the time to explore and branch out and look around before I really get settled-in.

Edit: and apparently numbered points don’t work. Good to know.

Ah, that’d do it - thanks!

Oh, and the Reply button is hard to hit for some reason.

NSFW tagging doesn’t blur the picture like it does on web.

The ability to see (and jump directly to) subscribed communities.

Woops, the ability to hide upvoted *submissions.

A way to edit posts lol.

The ability to hide upvoted posts.

I’d very much like an ipad layout please.

Also a way to consolidate multiple accounts across instances into a single feed.

Kbin compatibility.

Maybe… but I’d guess in the same sense that Digg is still around. You’re right about the type of people migrating here, though - Reddit no longer cares about intelligent discussion, it’s all memes and snark and political outrage. They don’t want an informed populace, they want a populace that can be steered toward whatever they want.

This is not the first mass migration I’ve seen from Reddit, but this is the first one that feels like it might actually stick, for a couple of reasons: First, Lemmy finally feels like a viable alternative. Previous alternatives like Voat were quite abrasive - like I’m all about free speech, but I don’t want to see a bunch of hateful content just for the sake of being shocking. Second, this time they’re fucking with the mods. And while a lot can be said about the quality of the moderation over there, people abhorr being asked to do more with less, especially when they’re working for free. Lose the mods and the site is DONE. It will be overrun with spam so quick it’ll make your head spin, and then the last exodus will occur, quietly. And Reddit cannot afford to replace the unpaid mods with paid mods, they simply don’t have the resources.

It will be interesting to see how things go with Lemmy, but I have hopes - with it being decentralized, if a community becomes toxic or overly-censored it seems easy enough to spin up a rival on a different instance and filter the bad actor. At least that seems to be the pitch, let’s see how things shake out over the next year or two.

I’ve been on Reddit for nearly 15 years (since just prior to the digg migration), but it is nothing like what it used to be - it’s changed, man, and not at all for the better. Lemmy definitely feels more like Reddit of old, and I’m excited to be here - now I just need to find my hobby communities and I’ll have my new internet home. But the communities will come, the apps will come, and I have high hopes. Let’s go!