As long as I get to cram all those accounts into a single portal or app, that's fine by me. I dislike having to look at multiple places to get slightly different variants of the same content.

I mostly agree with this. Here's how I use the Fediverse:

I have an account on every instance that I want to browse, while keeping my own personal instance up in the first tab. I browse multiple instances, and when it comes time to comment, I just add the post to my own instance and comment away.

I use all the other accounts as lurker accounts. That way, my identity on Lemmy is consistent but I still get to browse anything I want without worrying about everything federating properly.

At the moment it does make keeping track of accounts, servers and feeds easier.i think long term though the Devs will crack it and then single stream browsing from all your accounts, servers and subscriptions will be the norm.

It takes a bit to get used to it IMO. Whenever I'm browsing another instance, it's a bit awkward having to copy the link of whatever post I want to share, then open my instance, then paste the link into the search bar, and finally actually press the share button. In addition to that, a few Mastodon instances are "private" and won't let you browse them unless you have an account in them, which feels off considering I technically already do have a Mastodon account lol.

I also found Lemmy to be incredibly janky so far whenever you're looking for content from other instances.

Really I think these things will be eventually sorted out as the Fediverse matures, but part of that maturing process will probably be having a way of uniting accounts on multiple instances or maybe even multiple platforms. After all, as long as this is just an option, people who don't like it will still be able to have separate accounts on separate instances.

Federation is user-driven, not admin-driven: if you subscribe to content on a new instance, that instance will become federated with yours by default.

Defederation is admin-driven, but if done right it’s an added value: if you agree with the admins’ policies, they’re filtering out content you wouldn’t want to see anyway. So it should suffice to make one account on an instance whose policies you agree with—or barring that, an instance that never defederates from anyone.

And for maximum control, you can always start your own instance that just hosts your own account.