You don't need to make multiple accounts though? You go to lemmy.world, or wherever your account is and find your communities, anywhere in the fediverse from there.

To expand on the above analogy, if you are on your laptop, and your buddy is on his laptop hooked to the same network and you need a file off his computer you don't go to that computer to create an account and get the file, you just access it through the network you are both attached to. You can make comments and post all through the network.

Coming from reddit is fun app, I don't really understand how what you're proposing would work. You want the same functionality of having a separate account on each instance, but consolidated into one app to easy switch between accounts/instances, right?

If we translate this use case into the existing rif app layout, the subreddit selector panel on the left would need to have like lemmy instances instead of subreddits, with communities nested under each instance.

So you would have a different frontpage for each instance, which consisted of only the posts for communities hosted by that instance. Maybe I'm on the wrong track here, or you have a better idea of how it'd work.

How is that better or more intuitive than just having one personal frontpage for all of your subscribed communities? That way you don't even need to make a conscious decision to browse beehaw posts, they're just in the same feed as everything else.

I feel like it's more about the way you're thinking about posts being hosted on a particular server and what that means. In the context of Lemmy it only means something where the post you want is on an instance that's been defederated from for whatever reason, and even then only in terms of community discovery. Otherwise it's kinda meaningless in terms of your interaction with posts.

Thinking of the given community as a community 'on beehaw' per se is only really pertinent in cases where the fact it's on beehaw alone has some kind of impact on how you interact with it, e.g moderation style. But even in that case, moderation style could equally be an attribute you ascribe to the community itself, rather than beehaw. e.g. preferring r/games over r/gaming.

This way it makes more sense to think of the community as a lemmy community than a beehaw one, which seems fairly intuitive to me. Plus, that way the instance is doing the link aggregation and not your phone, which would be problematic for users and for scaling the ecosystem

I expected the same and became confused trying to log in another instance.

I think this is where I lucked out when I had so many issues creating an account on lemmy.world. I ended up making an account at thelemmy.club instead and it seems I can see and respond to all content from here so far.