I do it for the following reasons:
- The big main lemmy servers can and do go down regularly. having accounts on other instances still gives me the ability to log in and participate on the communities I care about. I sure do wish the underlying federation logic allowed for associating selected logins on various instances together somehow.
- Testing: often, I will create a post or comment into a community hosted on a different lemmy server and not see it update. When this happens, I'll log in on the other instance to see what that post or comment looks like from there.
- Insurance against defederation: I participated/followed some beehaw.org communities before they defederated, and then I was forced to open an account there to continue participating in those communities.