I wish. its more where you make your account is sharing with other fediverse sites along with most of the federation not needing a login. I wish it had been setup for members of the federation to be able to do someting like samly with the rest of it.

You can do that, but fediverse and threadiverse (Mastodon and Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin) are very different kinds of websites and it will lead to unexpected weirdness. Best to make a separate account for each type of thing (i.e. one for the twitter-like experience, one for the reddit-like, one for the instagram-like etc.).

Whether you use the same identity (e.g. same username on Mastodon and Piefed, linking your Mastodon profile in your Piefed profile etc.) for the whole fediverse is a matter of taste.

I have an account in the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed…) and one in microblogverse (mastodon, gotosocial…). just because they behave so differently it is not a great ux to be using only one.

in some instances it does make sense though. if your are not a heavy lemmy user and primarily use mastodon you could just @ the corresponding community in your posts. they will then show up normally here and you can still interact with it. (following communities on mastodon looks bad on mastodons end though)

or if you just want to comment or like a video on peertube you could just do that from any instance. peertube accounts also show up on lemmy like normal communities which is neat.

so in short if your are not planning on using something heavily it is probably enough to just use an account you already have. but like with everything you should just try things out and see what works best for you. :)

You don’t sound like an idiot at all.

You create an account on an instance/server. Your account is on piefed.social, which is a PieFed instance. However, you should really think of this as your piefed.social account, not as your PieFed account. You cannot login into PieFed with your Mastodon account, because you don’t have a “Mastodon Account”; You may have an account on a particular Mastodon instance (or server, whatever they call it), which allows you to login to that particular instance.

Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy, etc. are more like the filter through which you interact with the Fediverse. To a Mastodon server, every post is independent, for example. On Lemmy, you may post to a community, but on Mastodon a community is just a group that boosts posts made to it.

The way I do it, and the way I think is best, is that you should pick a way you prefer to interact with the Fediverse. Do you prefer threads like Lemmy or PieFed? Do you prefer single posts to the void like Mastodon? I don’t really know how Bookwyrm works, exactly, but it’s also just a way to interpret the same underlying stuff so that it can be understood as books and book ratings and reviews.

There may be features missing or not implemented here and there, depending on the instance or the software.

I only really use my Lemmy account (the one I’m using right now), because I prefer threads. Some people even call Lemmy and PieFed (and some others) the Threadiverse.

There’s no wrong way. Just have fun. But be warned that any account on a different server is exactly that: a different account! And each account lets you interact with a server, meaning that you see the Fediverse thru the eyes of the software it’s running, be it Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever, and everything will be filtered that way.

That’s my understanding of it, anyway.

I would recommand at least two accounts per fediverse type (type = microblog, threadiverse…)

So you can have a backup account in case your instance is down. Because currently there is no sync of our subcriptions, follows.

I hope we will have a kind of nomadic identity
to solve this.

Here is the idea for a sync app

The one account for all thing is often mentioned as a ‘selling point’, and as of now I think it’s rather ill-advised, setting up disappointment & possibly obershadowing a couple of nice things in that regard. A rather smooth part of the fediverse is that for example comments you read may stem from a lot of different corners, and writing one of those should work fine.

Regarding number of accounts you could experiment with a min or max approach first and then adapt based on your needs and experiences. You could re-use the first half of your handle, as the comment about identity suggested.

When I first joined Lemmy I made accounts on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee, since I didn’t have a solid idea of what instance to pick and wanted to have options. I was using the .world account when posting from a PC (because I liked Alexandrite) and sh.itjust.works on mobile. lemm.ee was a backup, though that whole instance ended up dying…

As soon as Boost started supporting piefed, I jumped ship and chose quokk.au simply because it’s the best name. Same reason I was on sh.itjust.works, really. My original two lemmy accounts are still around, but I don’t use them at all nowadays. They could come in handy if I ever need to make a lame joke about clones or bots or sockpuppets though.

You are asking a reasonable question that many ask.

Each account will be a unique and separate account on each instance. Instances do not share accounts.

Although you can, on some applications, authenticate with a federated account, like Google or even a Mastodon account, you still will have an entirely different account on the server.

I use Piefed and Lemmy. You can use one or all or any combination thereof but being on all of them would be a lot to manage. I started with Lemmy and am probably going to end up using PieFed (or maybe Mbin) because they have more features and better interfaces.

Try them all out and see what works best for you, there’s no right or wrong answer here really.

Create an account on mbin and it’ll allow seeing most of the fediverse. It has a microblog view, a thread view and a combined view. It isn’t picky about which services to connect to. I’m subscribed to peertube channels, people on pixelfed, and browse the threadiverse. It works well.

Lemmy can’t see mastodon, mastodon seems to have trouble seeing lemmy but can see mbin and piefed, peertube just sees peertube (although comments on peertube can come from all over the fediverse), pixelfed just pixelfed, and so on.

Someone mentioned nomadic identities and federated identities and I would love either of those. But for now, I recommend mbin.

Nope, at least one account per service.

You can even have multiple account per service (very common to have multiple ones on different instances).