Lemmy isn't hard to understand, it's just too convoluted to be anything but a niche interest for nerds. When someone in the gen pop asks "What's this fediverse thing?", the answers are all multiple paragraphs explaining the spaghetti network of instances. Your average user thinks facebook is the internet, you lost them two sentaces in.

Consider, they say, "hey, whats twitter" and you reply "a place to post short status updates."

they say, "hey, whats facebook" and you reply "a place where you parents share cat memes."

they say, "hey, whats instagram" and you reply "a place to share photos"

they say, "hey, whats Reddit" and you reply "a place to comment on the headlines without reading the articles"

they say, "hey, whats Lemmy" and you reply "Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. It's just like E-mail, in that it's a decentralized network of servers that are independently owned and can communicate with one another. That means whatever instance you pick, you can interact with every other instance in the friendiverse. Well, only as long as the servers are able to send the same type of messages, so if you're on Lemmy than you can't interact with Mastodon for example, except if you use a Kbin instance, then you can connect with Lemmy, Mastodon, and Peertube, it all depends on the server. Following along so far? Great! So now you may be asking, ok, I just want a Reddit replacement, which instance should I pick? And that's another easy question! Now the best thing about the Frediverse is that you've got boatloads of options like Lemmy, Kbin, Beehaw, etc, and each of those servers have their own instances that you can create an account with, but once you make an account on that instance, it works for every other instance on the server as well as every instance on every other server, except, if another server deferderates or blocks your server such as how Beehaw defederated or how Lemmy blocked Kbin, oh and also due to minor technical issues, you might not actually be able to see the same comments on other instances and they may take a good amount of time to get to you at which point the info is unrelated. Now some may just say just pick the biggest server, but that's actually a terrible idea because they tend to have worse moderation and be bought out by bad actors, such as my father who would regularly beat me with jumper cables, plus small to medium servers can just as easily connect with the rest of the fediverse, at least potentially. Obviously it depends on the rules set forth, people in charge, and political alignment of that instance, so make sure to pay close attention to that as due to all the infighting, you could be disconnected from other servers at any moment, but you can always just migrate which is a whole other tutorial. Instances have subs just like Reddit, and if your instance doesn't have the sub you want, there'll prob be another instance that does, except there'll actually be several instances that do, so you have to choose which of those subs you want to follow as you might miss out if you choose too little or get redundant threads if you do too much. Sorry what was the question again?"