Privacy paranoia, after seeing someone get doxxed and part of the process was “hmm, these accounts all express interest in the same specific things”. If two accounts express interest in programming, they are probably not owned by the same person. Programming and swimming, still probably not be the same. Programming and swimming and winemaking and [insert 7 more hobbies here]? A lot more likely to be owned by the same person.

Yes, I am a little nobody. Unfortunately, some nobodies have had people stalk their comment history during a disagreement and send harassing messages, or have had to get a restraining order against a crazy ex—does not take being a celebrity to want to be careful and wall off information about me and what I’m doing in case I get one of those types in the future trying to find me. And it makes me feel safer and doesn’t add much extra friction to my life.

I have expressed this sentiment before which I worry could be identifying (really, I should worry more about what else I’m leaking: smart enough to not say “Jane Smith from 842 Street” but reading my comment history might still give away more than I want) and I regret the fact human courtesy and a niggling worry you are judging me (come on, you’re an online stranger, I should not even care) is convincing me to reply, especially since I am worried you’ll just say my worries are unfounded and my reason is stupid and bad, but in a more polite manner. I tend towards wanting to explain the why of why I do things but purposely left out the explanation this time for that reason, until you specifically asked for it.

I could maybe understand someone arguing "I don’t want to be connected with only one instance, to avoid putting all my social presence in one basket, but then this is still not about identity anymore, because we could do that by using different “generic” instances.

Is it about keeping different personas? Having different styles of writing and interacting with others based on the audience? I could understand that, but it feels a bit weird, as if we are not allowed to be ourselves.

I don’t want to be myself, Jane Smith from 842 Street, age 32, with a specific social presence and identity online. I want to be another anonymous person in the void. Of course, I do realize I do technically have a presence, my username and post and comment history, I am not fully anonymous. I guess I want to be closer to anonymous than a specific person with a specific social presence, or at least I want to have my social presence segregated from Jane Smith. I don’t mind if people notice I tend to contribute to X community or make Y kind of comment, if they recognize my username. I do mind if people go explicitly digging to try to figure out that I am Jane Smith. Some people might and this is part of how I try to deal with it.

I fully understand I can just use Subscribed to only see what I want, and that I can subscribe to many different communities with different topics with it. I splinter my identity off per instance as a choice, which is why I brought it up, not as lack of knowledge on how to use Subscribed.

Curious what topics those instances are, then, then, unless you do not want to share that.

You know what you’re getting into when you go in (a programming forum),

Are you sure about that? [picture with non-programming topics]

Notice that your picture is set to All, which gives you all the communities people on programming.dev subscribe to so naturally it will not be restricted to just programming topics, because as you mentioned, a lot of people use one Lemmy account for a lot of different interests. Setting to Local will give you only the communities hosted here, all of which are programming-related. I browse by Local here and my feed is gloriously full of programming to the exclusion of all else. I feed my other interests on other accounts, which leads to…

that you use one account to talk to your friends from school and another to talk with your friends from the swimming club and another to send pictures to people you went camping last summer.

For my real life identity, I am definitely more on one account. But for talking to strangers online, my approach is a lot closer to one-thing-per-account. And because of that…

perhaps more people will be interested in using the dozen topic-based instances that I created last year.

What are they? I might sign up.

Hey, how do I join you guys? This reminds me a lot of r/TranscribersOfReddit. I know they had specific standards for transcription (such as how to handle images, maybe?), and I’m not sure if there is an established community with standards, or if I just see an item and go off with a transcription. I’m not a former Transcriber Of Reddit but I did always think it was interesting.