Signing up for an account on someone else's instance (pixelfed.social, mastodon.social, etc.) is like signing up for an email address through someone else's ema

Signing up for an account on someone else's instance (pixelfed.social, mastodon.social, etc.) is like signing up for an email address through someone else's email service provider (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.). @pixelfed.social accounts are exclusive to pixelfed.social, just as @gmail.com addresses are exclusive to Gmail. If you want to change instances or providers, you must also change your account's username or address. To have an email address that remains the same when you change email service providers, you need your own domain and a provider that supports custom domains. You can also have a fediverse account on your own domain that works in the same way without self-hosting, since there are also hosting providers for some fediverse services that support custom domains. Here are a few that I found: Spacebear (Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mastodon): https://app.spacebear.ee https://app.spacebear.ee Masto.host (Mastodon): https://masto.host https://masto.host Hostdon (Pleroma, Mastodon): https://hostdon.jp https://hostdon.jp (in Japanese) The main difference is that joining someone else's fediverse instance lets other users in the instance discover what you are posting more easily when they are not subscribed to you. For email, it doesn't matter whether your email address is on Gmail or your personal domain, since all messages are private.