There’s no doubt that 2026 will bring plenty of new Linux releases, with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS likely being the most anticipated, set to arrive at the end of April. But this article isn’t about the usual names that tend to dominate the conversation year after year.
Instead, I want to focus on two relatively new projects that left a strong impression on me in 2025. What sets them apart is their originality: they aren’t built on top of existing distributions, and they take genuinely fresh approaches to how a Linux system can be designed and function.
And no, this isn’t about the wave of immutability that defined much of 2025, nor about distributions overloaded with tools in an attempt to be everything to everyone.
But why use a million accounts to do that? You can use one, and then people will actually be able to curate their feeds accordingly.
Oh I don’t do that for that, there’s multiple reasons, but one of the bigger ones is to promote smaller instances because of the volume of posting it makes smaller instances more recognizable.
Other reasons for the multitude of accounts include making comms on fitting smaller instances (I make programming related comms on programming.dev or retro related on retrolemmy for example), protecting against the imposter problem and better interconnecting wayward smaller instances (you’d be surprised at the number of, even common comms, that smaller instances are missing out on that I discover just through my posting)
But why post with a million different accounts? That is the problem here. It’s not about supporting small instances when you use these accounts to post to huge instances like lemmy.world (which you do frequently). You could just create an account on a smaller instance, create the community with it, and never use it to post to a big instance.
You can do the same for the “imposter” problem you bring up, although I’m not convinced it’s really a problem. I honestly wouldn’t give a shit if someone used my handle on another instance - I only use this handle on Lemmy and no where else. If someone really started being a shitty person with my handle on another instance, I would just say that it’s not me and I have no idea who they are and leave it at that.
Like this is just crazy, man, I don’t know what else to say:
I specified already, people see the instances you post from and builds recognition for that due to the volume with which i post. So I rotate around which ones I post from
I haven’t posted to a .world comm (with the exception of linux_gaming) since the JL fallout and have moved quite a few of the comms I created there off it and am planning to move some of the larger ones I mod off there
It actually did happen to me, and they were spouting right-winger Nazi bullshit sooo yea. Turned out it was UM (unsurprisingly) lmao
And btw some of those accounts in your screenshot are the imposter accounts like Lonestar, az.social and pawn
But some of the others I don’t post from much if at all and just make comms with them
Most users do not pay attention to which instance someone is on, only a vocal minority seem to care. Even less will actually join an instance from just seeing it, as they’re likely already on an instance in the first place.
So once again, it just makes it impossible for people to curate their feeds. It makes you look like a spam bot, especially with how rapidly you repost things. And the amount of accounts with the same name really make you look like a spam operation.
It does far more harm than good in my opinion, and I actively avoid upvoting any of your posts because of that. If you just created the placeholder accounts and didn’t post with them, I wouldn’t feel this way.
You seriously don’t see how crazy the screenshots above look?