I think creating too many accounts as you try to find a home and figure out what instances are is a normal thing. I certainly did it as well 😂

You can think of each instance as a separate reddit website. The magic of the fediverse is all these separate full on websites are still the same thing and can interact with each other!

Having multiple accounts isn't necessarily redundant. When I joined Mastodon I picked a friendly instance at random, the owner is very strict about what will be visible in their instance's federated feed so a lot of instances are banned. Personally I'm fine with their choices since I don't want to see hate speech in my feed, but there could be scenarios where you disagree with your preferred instance's owner on what you want to see.

I did the same thing! I imagine many of us are in the same position :)

I didn't even KNOW we could reuse our Mastodon accounts here