I don’t know what instances are.

Five (seven counting instances that have gone down or will soon). I’ve got an account each on Glitch-Soc, Vanilla Mastodon, BookWyrm, Sharkey, and Lemmy (this one). I plan to add Friendica, GoToSocial, and Ibis to my flock of accounts. I may add a snac2 or Hollo if I decide to add some self-hosting to the mix. Not sure I’ll bother with PeerTube or Pixelfed.

What can I say? I’ve become a bit of a nerd about ActivityPub and I want to try (almost) everything out. 😱

Just this one. The dbzer0 instance is run in a manner I agree with (as democratic as possible, many choices determined by community vote), run by an admin I respect (former top mod of r/piracy, developer of a number of software projects that significantly improve quality of life on the fediverse by killing CSAM and offering community based trust and verification of instances), has been around long enough that I have no concerns about it suddenly disappearing with no notice, and generally doesn’t defederate from other instances unless they’re pedo or nazi related (so I don’t need to be on multiple instances to get at the fediverse content I want to see).

Plus, at the end of the day, if the instance goes down, I’ll just create an account somewhere else. If I don’t remember one of the communities I was subscribed to then I can’t argue that it was all that important in the first place.

Every time my GF Nicole joins a new instance, I make an account on there too. She’s a bit of a fediverse chick.

3: one for lemmy, one for Mastodon, one for Pixelfed. I’ll also count the one for loops.video once it federates.

i have one account per distinct service i use, lemmy - mastodon - pixelfed. Not sure why you’d need so many accounts? to protect your highly unique nickname?

I was on beehaw originally, then I switched to lemmy.world because I wanted to see the whole threadiverse, not just the parts that beehaw deigned to federate with, and now lemm.ee because it seems least likely to impulsively defederate, ban, or otherwise get in the way of me browsing Lemmy. Also it has downvotes. But I only ever used one at a time.

Just the one right now. I haven’t really found a reason to sign up for more. I also really don’t want the added burden of maintaining multiple accounts. That sounds exhausting.

This one, kbin.melroy.org and that’s all I’m ever signing up for.

Only as many as I need for grouping my subscribed communities neatly. As there are no “multireddits” on Lemmy, your subscribed feed will be dominated by the popular communities, while all the small ones will be buried and forgotten. In order to solve that issue, I need a few accounts. If Lemmy grows, my need for accounts also grows. Maybe one day I’ll b have ten accounts.

Just the one i that host myself

4 (kbin.social, kbin.run, kbin.earth, fedia.io) originally. 2 have closed already (kbin.social, kbin.run) which just leaves Kbin.earth and fedia.io

Lemmy, Mastodon (but don’t care for it), Pixelfed

My main Lemmy account on jlai.lu where I got all my subs, another one on another instance I only use to admin a community over there (there is less bugs when using a local account over a remote one), and one Mastodon account that I almost never use—it’s just, I don’t know, maybe it’s an age thing (50+) but I’m not that interested in receiving constant flow of short messages, even less so when said messages are so often emotional and/or polemical (as a general rule, I try to stay away from anger and resentment).

I have a few more accounts on various platforms I tried here and there and decided to not use. So, I would say those don’t count.

Different interests require different accounts on different services. Not everything is served by lemmy e.g music, video, and blogs. Lemmy can’t do it all --> different accounts.