To me it's just another security layer. If one instance goes down, or an account gets hacked/banned etc I can just swap over to another one. Also I have different sets of subscriptions for each account, so if I'm looking for a different flavor of my feed I just swap to the associated account.
It could come in handy not only as username reserve, just found out you can follow mastodon users from kbin (you can't in lemmy), maybe it's well know already but for me everything is still a discovery :D
I saw that one of the largest Lemmy's hadn't had 3 names taken that are high value (to me at least) so I snatched up the three I use often or really wanted. I've always dreamed of being one of the like [email protected] and now I am!
It appears to me that since beehaw defederated, the beehaw communities still exist on the cut off instances (like Lemmy.world) and the instance still lets you interact with it, but your changes won’t be propagated back to beehaw or to other instances.
They can normally if their instance is not defederatd.
But if beehaw defederate some instance, only the one from their own instance can see and interact with their post.
So for example, I have an account in lemmy.world and posting it to beehaw tech community. Other user from lemmy.world can see my post and reply normally. But other user from other instances (including beehaw itself) can't even see the post.
Basically like shadowban in reddit but for all users in an instance
No that's literally what you don't need to do. You only need one account, your instance will talk to other instances to bring you content from the whole network, to your one account. That includes the ability to comment on it, and interact with, etc.
An instance is just the word people use on the Fediverse for "Fediverse website". It's often preceded by the name of the platform the website is running, eg "Lemmy instance" or "Mastodon instance".
It's kind of like saying "WordPress website".
Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.one, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, etc are all different websites running Lemmy, so they're Lemmy instances. Mastodon.social, mstdn.social, Mastodon.world, tenforward.social, etc. Are all just different websites running Mastodon.
Fediverse websites have the ability to request and mirror content in an ongoing manner from users or groups (which is what a Lemmy community is, a Fediverse group managed by a Lemmy server) on other Fediverse websites. From other "instances". This gives an imperfect illusion of everyone being in the same place, when we're actually spread across a dozen (or over 10,000,of you count the entire Fediverse) websites or more.