This question comes to me because since we cannot hop through instances (AKA transfer from one instance to another your account) I’d like to create an account into another instance, for research purposes, but if this ‘feature’ comes in a near future I’d love to bring my main account to said instance, preferably with the same username and if I have it “mirrored” (same username) I think that’d make it impossible.
From my understanding it should be possible, I think that’s the case with many communities/sites, but I’m not sure here.
I hope I’m being clear.
You need to adjust your thinking a tad. The instances are all separate servers / websites that have agreed to talk in a certain way, that happen to use identical software. So it’s like going to Amazon and creating an account and then going to Imgur and creating an account. No one cares that there are two identical usernames as it’s two entirely separate databases.
Where it gets more relevant to Lemmy is that your username has @instance.abc after it.
While this is absolutely true, the more accurate analogy is with email.
Bob@gmail.com and Bob@yahoo.com can still communicate, send emails to eachother, etc. Even if it’s the same person operating the keyboard. Separate platforms, common protocol.
I think an even more accurate analogy, but one that very few people these days will understand, is that Lemmy is like the connected BBS’s of the late 80s and early 90s where each BBS had message boards, and users could communicate between each other. It was quite slow, being modem based, and usually only a nightly schedule for connecting, but it did work quite well.
Yeah I get that, now the question is if I can delete my account in “X” instance and then create it again with the same username.