Probably a good idea for us to make Lemmy accounts so we can be active there as reddit libs move in.

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"