I don’t fully understand how lemmy works completely yet. But for example I made an account at Division by zero and subscribe here to post. Is it not just a more inconvenient version of making a reddit account and being able to post practically anywhere?
Also what’s the difference between making an account at one instant and just making one centralized account for the social media?
The practical benefit is when things go wrong.
Imagine that you’d rather not deal with the Reddit admins, for whatever reason. You have two options: either you suck it up and deal with them, or throw away all Reddit content, communities and people, because of those admins.
Now imagine that you had some issue with the administration of your Lemmy instance. You still have both options above, plus a third one: migrate to another instance. You still have access to [mostly] the same content, communities and people as you did before; but you don’t need to deal with the admins of your older instance. You can eat the cake and have it too. That’s exactly what I did rather recently by the way.
Unfortunately the fediverse, at least in the Lemmy/kbin sense, doesn’t solve that particular problem. This exact scenario can still happen because a community belongs to an instance, and that instance can still be maliciously or just ineptly managed. There are also added complications with federation, defederation, instance/community politics, and just dealing with “duplicate” communities in general.
For example, certain highly political instances host many communities that are not political, and have been known to silently ban people from the whole thing just because their politics were “wrong”. Sounds Reddity to me.
Even then, you can still move the community to another instance. You won’t get the same address, but provided that the community wants to leave, it will. (In fact I’m doing this right now, migrating !linguistics@lemmy.ml into !linguistics@mander.xyz )
That’s because the community is not just some address on the URL bar. It’s the users and the content that they share with each other. It’ll be where the users are.