The answer is complicated: basically it used to be hard, but now it’s generally really easy.
So here’s the long, system lore answer.
To begin with, we were awake and active as a plural system before the fictionkin community was a thing. None of us knew that we had experience d multiple lifetimes, or that we existed in more than one aspect (kintype/shift), with the exception of 😼🔪 who was struggling with figuring out his first fictionkin awakening through nightmares with the total absence of community or context.
So for a long time we thought that there was a certain core handful of us system members, and that certain others (fictives generally) came and went on occasion.
What was happening behind the scenes that we weren’t understanding is that we have at least theoretically a fixed system of 25 (fuzzy count) members. Many of these members weren’t awake or active yet, and the ones that were would sometimes ‘disappear’ in one aspect, and reappear in a different aspect.
About a year and a half or two years ago we had a serious system shakeup where we realized for a few reasons what had been happening, and a lot of “system members” turned out to be disconnected aspects of other members and “popped back together” into a more full awareness of themselves.
We spent a long few months going around figuring out who was who, and even found a lot of system members who had been awake longer than they thought, because an aspect of them was one of the people we thought had vanished earlier.
So now that we know who is a distinct person, and how many we have, it’s a matter of each distinct person doing their own kintype questioning, as if they were singlet.
And if we had someone apparently new show up, disconnected from who is already around, we’d do the same and before and see if they were someone’s disconnected kintype shift (expect? Lol), or if they were actually another distinct person!
Please feel free to ask more if there’s more detail you’re interested in.