i have one account per distinct service i use, lemmy - mastodon - pixelfed. Not sure why you’d need so many accounts? to protect your highly unique nickname?

4 - Started with Kbin and .world. Left my Kbin one behind because Lemmy appealed to me more. Left my .world account when they blocked piracy websites and opened a the account on my current instance (Midwest.social). I also opened a Hexbear account a while ago to join their watch parties.

Just this one. The dbzer0 instance is run in a manner I agree with (as democratic as possible, many choices determined by community vote), run by an admin I respect (former top mod of r/piracy, developer of a number of software projects that significantly improve quality of life on the fediverse by killing CSAM and offering community based trust and verification of instances), has been around long enough that I have no concerns about it suddenly disappearing with no notice, and generally doesn’t defederate from other instances unless they’re pedo or nazi related (so I don’t need to be on multiple instances to get at the fediverse content I want to see).

Plus, at the end of the day, if the instance goes down, I’ll just create an account somewhere else. If I don’t remember one of the communities I was subscribed to then I can’t argue that it was all that important in the first place.

I was on beehaw originally, then I switched to lemmy.world because I wanted to see the whole threadiverse, not just the parts that beehaw deigned to federate with, and now lemm.ee because it seems least likely to impulsively defederate, ban, or otherwise get in the way of me browsing Lemmy. Also it has downvotes. But I only ever used one at a time.

I don’t know what instances are.