Sometimes what a person needs is a decentralized collection of free and open source social media platforms

During the Reddit blackout I decided that I wanted to move away from Reddit to a FOSS alternative. At the time I was a bit of an anarcho-Bidenist, so I considered joining Raddle. I never made an account there, but it was still enough to give me a bad impression of Dessalines just from the things about him that Raddle users posted.

Ultimately I decided against joining Raddle in favor of joining the fediverse, simply because I knew that a centralized platform was doomed to fail. And I'd wanted to join the fediverse for a long time anyways, so I figured that the Reddit Blackout was a good opportunity to make the jump and hopefully take a few others with me. Somebody had already created a Kbin magazine for a subreddit I moderate and was willing to hand over the reins to me, and because on top of that I'd branded Dessalines as a "tankie" and that tainted Lemmy as a whole for me, I decided to create an account on Kbin Social. And I sang the praises of how with just one account I could access content across a huge federated network.

I wasn't completely comfortable with Kbin Social because it had that porn-filled "random posts" section and was otherwise kinda buggy, and I didn't like how Kbin Social relied so much on Lemmy for content, but I nevertheless understood Kbin Social as my best bet for an "as-un-tankie-as-possible" Reddit alternative with lasting potential. Nevertheless, I soon ended up creating a Blåhaj Lemmy account, mainly so that I could federate my Kbin magazines on the biggest trans-centric threadiverse instance, as well as get experience with using Lemmy, and also because Kbin Social was unstable and so I could just browse Blåhaj Lemmy whenever Kbin Social was down. So I could still talk about the "one account for the whole fediverse" thing, just that you might need multiple accounts if your main instance is a bit unstable.

However, it quickly became evident that Kbin Social was incapable of moderating against transphobia, and the porn and spam and bugginess and mediocre interface were becoming bigger and bigger problems for me as well. I wasn't gonna be one of those losers who just used the fediverse for a short while before going back to Reddit, and not wanting to create more fediverse accounts than I strictly needed, I decided to migrate to Blåhaj Lemmy instead of creating a new account on a different Kbin instance. This made Kbin Social my backup instance. I thought, "Sure, Lemmy's developed by a tankie, but it's FOSS, the Blåhaj Lemmy staff can always just fork it if they really don't like what Dessalines is doing, it's not like the developer actually taints the whole platform, that was very silly of me to think that."

And then Blåhaj Lemmy started federating with Hexbear. I quickly fell in love with the Hexbears' culture, I loved their trans spaces, and I found that despite what others on Blåhaj Lemmy had said about these "savage brigaders" or whatever, that the Hexbears actually treated me very well. This was probably because I knew that people don't just form their worldviews out of thin air, and so I was coming at these discussions with an inquisitive perspective and an understanding that there was probably some sort of difference in knowledge or experience to account for these differing viewpoints.

When talks of Blåhaj Lemmy defederating from Hexbear started, I argued very firmly for continued federation with Hexbear despite other Blåhajs' protest, and this made me feel an even stronger relationship to Hexbear: before I'd just been an occasional guest, albeit one who'd made a fairly strong first impression; but now I was suddenly acting like an ambassador.

Eventually Hexbear defederated from Blåhaj Lemmy over issues with Blåhaj Lemmy's handling of chasers and ableism. Blåhaj Lemmy was denied the satisfaction of defederating first, and I considered Hexbear's decision to defederate to have been very respectable. Because Hexbear had demonstrated that it had a high tolerance for anarchists; because I was increasingly fed up with the bad politics of Blåhaj Lemmy's admins, and their bad handling of the debacles that led Hexbear to defederate; and because Hexbear just had a lot of really great users and communities that I wanted to keep having access to; I decided to create a Hexbear account, and I downloaded Liftoff for Lemmy so that I could combine my feeds for both Hexbear and Blåhaj Lemmy. And so I gradually stopped using Kbin entirely, because if Hexbear was down I still had Blåhaj and vice versa.

When I joined Hexbear, I said, "I hope it'll take longer before I have to make an Erika4sis somewhere" — I was cautiously optimistic that I wouldn't be pushed by the circumstances to create any more fediverse accounts on any more instances.

When Liftoff stopped working, I started browsing Hexbear on its own website. Soon after that I pretty much stopped browsing Blåhaj Lemmy entirely, as I found that Blåhaj Lemmy's culture just wasn't doing it for me compared to the value I actually got out of its content. And so I had slowly transitioned over the course of several months from being a Kbin'er, to a Kbin'er who'd been pushed by the circumstances to create a Blåhaj account, to a Kbin-Blåhaj "dual citizen", to a full-fledged Blåhaj, to a Blåhaj who'd been pushed by the circumstances to create a Hexbear account, to a Blåhaj-Hexbear "dual citizen", to a full-fledged Hexbear. And likewise, while a big part of my initial draw to Hexbear had been its left-unity policy, I had nonetheless found myself increasingly abandoning anarchist ideas in favor of Marxist ones, the more time I spent on Hexbear. But I still told myself, "Three accounts. Three. Tops. We are not going to create a fourth fediverse account, that's just a waste. We are not going to do that. Never."

A few months ago I downloaded Dessalines' Thumb-Key because Messagease was enshittifying. A few weeks ago I updated my Hexbear user description to follow "anarchist" with "at least, I was when I got here". A few days ago I subscribed to Dessalines' YouTube channel where he shares cool audiobooks, and also a day or two ago someone described a Hexbear post I'd commented on as a part of the "Hexbear to Lemmygrad pipeline", to which I replied something like, "What do you mean?" but never got a response. When Hexbear's SSL certificate briefly expired a few days ago, I became used to checking Lemmygrad to see the status of Hexbear.

On April 8th, officially yesterday as I write this, Hexbear was down for more or less the whole day. I checked Lemmygrad for Hexbear's status, and eventually I determined that it wasn't enough for me to have two accounts on opposite sides of the Lemmy Iron Curtain: I determined that Blåhaj Lemmy is so different from Hexbear that it cannot practically serve as a backup whenever Hexbear is down. And so I decided to apply for a Lemmygrad account, which was soon granted.

And thus we arrive at the present situation, "Hexbear who's been pushed by the circumstances to create a Lemmygrad account", where Hexbear and Lemmygrad are my Eastern Bloc instances, whereas Kbin Social and Blåhaj Lemmy are my Western Bloc instances, and where I very strongly prefer Eastern Bloc content to Western Bloc content. Within the span of less than a year I went from refusing to use Lemmy at all because its developer was a "redfash tankie", to unironically having an account on Lemmygrad Dot Em El, although obviously my path towards Marxism can't just be chocked up to Lemmy but obviously a slew of other factors.

In any case, today is the day I truly became Heisenberg. Chemistry is the study of change and all that. All of this only happened because at every turn the more "tankie" option has been better than the liberal option.

Hexbear's back up now, so I guess I'm gonna return to where I came from. Maybe something in the near future will push Lemmygrad to become my main instance. Only time will tell.