I know that Lemmy.cafe is defederated from your instance, which hosts an active mealtime videos and documentaries community, if that interests you.

A good neutral instance would be sopuli.xyz if you want to stick with Lemmy, or piefed.ca if you'd like to give the piefed interface a try.

Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:

• a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
• the ability to combine comments from multiple communities/instances under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
• the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.

You're fine man. Think someone assuming you're old because you use yahoo for email, not getting jumped for wearing the wrong gang colours

It's also really easy to make a new account if somewhere seems cool enough that you want to

You just sign up on another, it's not too bad, but it's not like you HAVE to move either.

You can export all of your subscriptions, saved posts/comments and blocked user/comms by clicking the export button in your profile, which will give you a file you can import to any new account on a different Lemmy or piefed instance.

Lots of random unaffiliated people end up on .ml and it's not as serious as you're worrying.

If you want to switch, "switching" is mostly a matter of creating an account on that one and just using that, as far as I understand it.

But I'm pretty sure Lemmy has an account settings feature that lets you export and re-import things like community subscriptions, etc.

Try not to get frustrated, it only feels this way at first. Congrats on leaving the corporate hellscape.

Everything's got problems. Ours are just smaller and more fiddly.

It's not that hard to pick a new instance. .ml has pretty limited reach, other servers have much wider federation, maybe contains-the-whole-circle wider.