/0 Governance

Of course, happy to help! You're far from the only person on the Fediverse who isn't entirely sure how the whole thing works, it's kinda confusing stuff to wrap your head around, so please don't sweat it at all, and ask as many questions as it takes <3

Some instances are general-purpose, some instances are specific to a certain locality/country, some (such as my own, pawb.social, which is a specifically furry-friendly instance) are for special interests, and so on. There's no harm in creating a few accounts on a few different instances and just seeing which you prefer the vibes of, or just pick one and roll with it. I'd personally recommend avoiding lemmy.ml and hexbear.net as well, as those are both pro marxist-leninist instances and can be quite intolerant of people who do not agree with their world views, and are widely defederated, so they're a little bit more siloed, but it can be worth having an account there too if you're interested in seeing content from them from time to time.

This post seems to imply the mods are pro-maga or anti free speech or something, but when I peruse Lemmy I don’t see any of that

There are some admins of the Lemmy.world instance who are pro-Zionist/pro-Israel, and who are intolerant of anti-Zionist messaging. The way that they suppress dissent is generally hard to spot unless you yourself engage in anti-Zionist conversations, because it's generally through silently deleting comments and enforcing rules more harshly and in a one-sided way against those who they personally disagree with, and selectively not enforcing rules for those who agree with their views. You'd need to be looking for trends in what kinds of posts/comments are most commonly deleted in the Lemmy.world mod log - when the mod logs are even made public, which sometimes they aren't. So you can't be blamed at all for being unaware of the issue, especially considering that the admin team are quite cagey around the topic.

What's the deal with Lemmy/PieFed? Why do they both exist?

So, basically, Lemmy and PieFed are both just different interfaces into the same content. It works a little bit like email - you have your own email provider and other people have their own email providers, and everyone can communicate with each other through email, but the different providers have different interfaces and so on. Some providers use the Lemmy interface, and others use the PieFed interface. PieFed has a couple extra features, like polling, but Lemmy has existed for a lot longer, and may be a bit more stable. Basically, just pick whatever, feel free to try them both out and see what you like.

As for why, basically, because someone decided they could do a better version of Lemmy, and decided to just go off and do it, and they made PieFed. There's a bit more of a story behind why they decided to, but it's ultimately not important for users.

Also if I create a new account, how does that hurt .world? Shouldn’t I delete my current account too?

Because Lemmy.world has the overwhelming majority of users and communities, they can throw their weight around and bully other, smaller instances, which is basically what is happening in this recent drama. By migrating users (and ideally, communities) off of lemmy.world, they become less capable of doing that, and so they have to act a bit better behaved and play well with other instances for mutual co-operation.

It's up to you whether you delete your account or not - usually active users are used, rather than overall users, to judge the size/activity of an instance.

I didn’t really subscribe to communities but I did tag some favorite posts. Can those be transferred?

Yeah, you can do it manually, or you can use the automated tool I linked above - it'll move your saved/favorite posts/comments over as part of that process.

Hope this helps, feel free to ask if there's anything else you need clarified!