nucleative put 2 different ideas in their comment actually.

The first idea was moveable accounts, just transferring like Mastodon does, which still gives the instance admin a chance to decline or ban you.

The 2nd idea was the account working on all instances at any time by using public/private key encryption, this could cause issues with moderation.

I guess you could combine the ideas to require an explicit transfer, while still using the encryption keys to maintain ownership of old content in some way, maybe.

Lemmy’s export/import settings isn’t really that different from what Mastodon does, since you normally can’t follow Lemmy users anyways, so there are no followers (or very few) to transfer.

This is another reason why when we tell Reddit users to use Lemmy, we should give them a link to a specific instance that is known to have a smooth and quick signup

I believe this is being improved in the v1.0 release of Lemmy coming soon:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5057

and they have other ideas in their issues log to further improve, like:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

This sounds like a moderation nightmare. Just create a troll account on one instance and now you can use it to login to every other instance and start spreading hate. When that instance bans you then you just move to the next instance? These instance admins don’t even see your signup application, they can’t stop you?

most of the replys seem to be, “it’s too hard/confusing to sign up” we won’t get these people to sign up anyways

I often see people on Reddit saying they had issues with the confirmation email, definitely something for instance admins to look into

and I think Lemmy now allows resending so that’s good