You can join any lemmy and still interact with the others. Lemmy.ml does not require an email but you have to answer a questionnaire and wait to get approved. I got approved after a few minutes. The site is pretty overloaded now and some people are running into problems making accounts. lemmy.world requires an email, but you can use a temporary email and there's no questionnaire. Here's a list of federated lemmy sites https://the-federation.info/platform/73. Be wary of beehaw.org, they have some sketchy lib mods who have already blocked hexbear as a hatespeech site, which is unfounded to the point of absurdity. I would steer clear of associating your account with them, although it probably doesn't matter.
so, iirc, during account creation lemmy.ml has you answer three questions, which I think were:
- why do you want to join lemmy?
- what communities do you want to join?
- why did you choose this username?
my responses (which you can probably get away with paraphrasing) were something like:
- "i like the idea of a social network with no owners or venture capital calling the shots and shaping discourse"
- (i just glanced at the community list and named a few I liked, including /c/socialism, /c/china, and like /c/music)
- "[username] is already my username on another leftist forum that will probably federate with lemmy in the future"
it has a weirdly even mixture. you can find threads where communists and anti-communists get similar numbers of votes in a back and forth.
OK, I signed up.
lol, they just closed the ”Does lemmy.world allow criticism of the CCP?” thread after I made fun of someone's le Winnie the Pooh social credit post :xi:
i had like three comments I was writing when they closed the thread :stalin-stressed:
that's more on me for being such a scatterbrain though, the comments probably sat there for an hour