Everyone voted with starting from scratch so that's what we went with, though I'm creating a script to migrate old posts over for community moderators.
I was able to go to the .ml lemmy and see the communities I was subscribed to since I was still logged in. I copied the url of each, changed to .net, and hit subscribe with my new account. Probably not feasible if you subscribed to a lot of communities, but it was quick for me.
That would have been nice to know about, I would have really preferred to get my account back. I get wanting to start fresh but it seems weird to vote for nobody to get an option.