I found the lemmyverse super confusing for the longest time, especially how so wildly different looking sites would interact.
I see every so often people talking about more than one account on different instances.
Why should i, or why shouldnt use more than one?
What benefits would I, a very average user gain from it?
It’s useful to have an alt because some instances block other instance you might be interested in.
Also, performance and availability reasons. If lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or in your case beehaw.org goes down, you can just use your account on another instance as if nothing happened.
There’s also been situations like vlemmy.net which the admins seems to have decided to pull the plug with no warning and disappeared, then there’s lemmy.fmhy.ml whose domain just got cancelled among many other free ml domains and is/was down for an extended period of time.
Sure but how would I go a out syncing all these accounts in terms of content I have seen, communities or similar? It seems to be an awful lot of effort
And I even noticed some difference in content on the same community on different instances so thats also a little weird
You can use this tool to help. https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim When you unsubscribe, you have to unsubscribe from each account manually, though.
Thanks for spreading the word about LASIM!
Just letting you know that today I finished an update that adds upload options, including an option you can turn on to “sync removals”, which kindof achieves this.
It may not be the right tool for every scenario though - turning it on basically means that whatever account you upload too will end up identical to the one you downloaded by following/unfollowing and blocking/unblocking as needed. But if you’ve got new follows, blocks, etc. spread across several accounts you wouldn’t want to turn it on or you’d lose all the changes on the accounts except for whichever one you downloaded.
The option works better in scenarios where you’re mostly using a Main account, and just trying to keep the Alt accounts in sync with whatever the Main account does.
Thanks for the work. You are a life saver. I coincidentally ended up in the scenario you described: using an account (big instance) to subscribe to everything. Syncing unsubscription from a main account would work well for me.
How to use lasim? I downloaded lasim_windows.zip from github which contains an exe file. Is this the file I need to use? I want to create a back up account. How to find out which instances are supported? Also, how does this work? Will the backup account automatically get subscribed to all communities?
Yep, if you are on Windows just extract that .exe somewhere and then run it.
The README is displayed underneath the screenshots on the link to LASIM above. It tells you how to run it. See “How it Works”.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim#how-it-works
The latest version supports any Lemmy 0.18.3 instance. You can see which version a Lemmy instance is at the bottom of site. For example, your instance, reddthat.com, is 0.18.3. Most instances should have upgraded to 0.18.3 already - choose one of those. Any instance running 0.18.3 should work, big or small.
The account you “download” with won’t be touched at all. The account you “upload to” will receive all the subscriptions and blocks of the downloaded account.
Hey after entering my instance login details and hitting download, the application window is disappearing. What’s going wrong?
I got an error log: Unexpected Error Occurred: “called
Option::unwrap()on aNonevalue”Could be some kind of new bug, but I’ve also seen this happen when an instance is under heavy load or otherwise glitching out - it’s starts sending back invalid items on the API and LASIM chokes on them.
For what it’s worth I made an account on reddthat.com and was able to download and upload to it fine.
Maybe try again? Or is this some other instance? (I’m making assumptions based on your account)
Great! Thanks for the info. I will check it out.
I might keep an eye out for this, thanks
Besides what max_p explained, my reasoning was/is this:
I am a Reddit refugee. I did not want to have one corporation “in charge” of my account anymore on a platform. That is why I like the idea of the fediverse. Multiple instances make it more “resilient” towards “strange” decisions or decisions that don’t align with my ideas.
However, on one instance, the admin is the sole responsible (who does not even have to explain the decisions to a board or something). So making sure you are active on multiple instances counters their “power”.
I even went so far as to running my own instance. Because then I can be the crazy dictator if I want to.
Crazy dictator eh? I can get behind that. What’s your instance?
Their instance seems to be a waste of space (/s)
Waste-of.space :)
Yeah, one main and one porn.
I find it super convenient. Got 2 lemmy accounts - 1 on feddit.de and one on lemmy nsfw for… you know, reasons
Be horny on main you coward
I need to know what you weirdos jerk off to
I do not jerk for I do not posess a sausage And I also don’t use Lemmy for porn, its like wanting to use r34 sites for high quality writing
This could be considered a support question but it’s less of a “how do I?” and more of a “why should I?” so leaving it up.
Having more than one account is really convenient. You could still browse the fediverse if your instance goes down or something else happens to it. Also you might want a new account because you instance federates(or doesn’t) some other instances. But this can also get out of control. I have 5 Lemmy accounts, 2 kbin accounts, on kbin.social and artemis.camp, so I can use artemis, and 1 account on mastodon
But you can’t sync your subscriptions between your account, right? If using the second account as backup you’d have to subscribe to your communities twice.
I think someone shared an extension to sync them in this thread
I’m newish to the whole fediverse thing myself. I’ve made 3 lemmy accounts on different instances mainly due to lemmy.world being a bit unstable and Lasim making it easy to migrate communitya.
Also made a kbin, mastodon and because I read a lot a bookwyrm account.
Couldnt you do that with one account since its all the fediverse?
Nope I don’t think so but the 3 lemmy accounts might be overkill I’ll maybe delete my original lemmy.world one. I think 2 are needed in case an instance has issues.
I see, thank you
