depends on what you want! if you want to get a sense about how federation will work, check out one of the test instances. Usernames will be unique per instance, but when interacting with other instances, the instance of origin is part of the identifier. this is how it works on mastodon as well; there may be a ton of @maya s out there on infinite instances, so my identifying username is @maya@occult.institute including the instance I use.

broadly because the model here is friendly to throwaway accounts, I don’t see a downside to having accounts anywhere you feel like and then once federation hits, picking a home instance and using that one. the accounts can’t be merged, but you can follow the same communities remotely. (no export import feature yet, but it’s technically doable)

I haven’t contributed code to the project so nutomic and dessalines are the real recipients of your thanks. :)