Generally agreeing with Cowbee's reply. I joined lemmy.ml years ago when it was explicitly "leftist" (as in socialist) but that's not written in the instance description anymore, and I am interested in FOSS discussion but you don't have to care about that to use the instance. This was the first instance, which was created by the two core developers who are both communists. I wanted an instance that was socialist-leaning, stable and isn't trigger-happy with defederating or regularly getting defederated, so this one is great for me.

I have mixed feelings on Hexbear, I like dropping in sometimes and some of their comms are nice, but I see them as prone to mod powertripping and the culture is (overall, not always) a bit low-effort for my liking and prone to idealism/sloganism/dogmatism. So I'm usually only using a couple of specific comms or laughing at /c/slop.

I haven't kept up with Lemmy software updates so I don't know where it's at with migrating an account. I've had a couple of different accounts simultaneously (one on an instance which died years ago, one on an interest-themed instance) rather than just having one main account. And like they said, there's little downside to abandoning an account beyond inconvenience. There's no 'karma' score shown by default, and you can re-use your username on the other accounts if your name had a reputation you want to keep.