Sorry it takes 4 days to get a response to you! It’s not really lemmy.world’s fault, lemmy has a bug (more like a design problem) that means servers can only send one federation activity (post, comment, or vote) at a time. It has to wait for a response before sending the next one. Because their server is on the other side of the world to ours (plus some other technical reasons), we can only receive around 4 or 5 activities per second. Unfortunately they have gone over that threshold, it’s so big they are creating more activities than we can receive. There are other servers in our area having the same issue, auzzie.zone is over 5 days behind! There are various people working on various things to help this, but it’s all taking time.

So as for accounts, they only exist on one instance. A bit like an email address where dave@gmail.com would be different to dave@outlook.com. However, the last lemmy update added the ability to export your settings (found on your settings page on the website). So now you can create a new account on another instance and move all your settings over, including the communities you follow, but this isn’t quite the same as moving your account. For example, you’ll have to log in to the lemmy.world account to see any replies to comments you made on that account. Nothing is “forwarded” to your new account (Mastodon actually has something along these lines, but Lemmy doesn’t yet).

There are many people on this instance who use multiple accounts. Because how the federation works in lemmy, different instances see different posts in the Local feed (only communities hosted on that instance) and the All feed. This is because the All feed is posts from all the communities that the members of your instance are subscribed to. Different instances have different members with different subscriptions and so you’ll see different content. So many people like to have a few different accounts and switch between them,

Lemmy.world is so massive it would be interesting to hear what other instances are like in comparison! On lemmy.nz our Local feed is mostly posts in the newzealand or politics communities, with occasional regional posts. All has a lot more content, but at the moment we are missing lemmy.world posts for the most part. Because of a special prefetching that’s set up to try to help with the issue, we get them straight away but with no votes on them. We can’t prefetch the votes so they take 3 days to come across, by which point the posts are all three days old. So the Hot posts never have lemmy.world content at the moment because they have no votes on them.

There are plenty of other instances too. At this point most instances are up to date with both lemmy.world and us, just the handful that are having problems. You can actually check which ones are having issues - here’s lemmy.world’s status. Lemmy federates with lots of other platforms so many are mastodon, kbin, or others, but you can have a look for an instance and check how it’s doing by putting it into that site.

I guess the other thing to know is that different sites de-federate from each other. For example, beehaw.org is a nice, big, friendly instance, but they defederated from lemmy.world because Beehaw are strict moderators and have a vision for their site and lemmy.world was too big, too many users from lemmy.world causing issues on beehaw. Some instances don’t defederate from anyone, but that can be a bit crazy too. Most of the larger instances would be fine to join, though.

Accounts are also free, so just pick any and if you don’t like it try another! Most will have registration applications turned on though (so you can’t use your new account until you’ve been approved), as spam is becoming quite a problem and reviewing each new user is an easy way to avoid being the instance spambots like to use. But I’m sure you’re patient enough, most instance will approve new users so long as the follow the instructions.

Happy to answer questions but I know it’s going to take 3 or 4 days before I see your response so maybe pick an instance and sign up, then come back here and ask your questions with your new account 😆