Neil
I just hope we don't have a mass drop in activity when the protests end. Been waiting for Lemmy to blow up for years and this is our best shot at making that happen.
You do not need a separate login per instance. You can make one login on one instance and communicate with all the others as long as the instance you are trying to communicate with is not banned by your instance. I can give further clarification upon request.
Please let me know what areas you are struggling with and I'll do my best to explain. I think the difficulty of Lemmy is being exaggerated and maybe if things are explained succinctly it will help the community tremendously. I will try my best.
Except (as far as I'm aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.
The official term is "community" as noted in one of the earlier github commits:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/b0a6fefcf9dc861ae0b4757154050ec3f14ac14f
You can see a full discussion of the issue below:
Glad to see Lemmy finally taking off. I'm honestly scared the Reddit admins will buckle. This is where everyone should be. We can make this place as great as Reddit and it will be even better due to the decentralized nature of the network.