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I'm quite lost, and don't think I fully understand the distributed nature of the various Lemmy instances (if I'm even using those words properly).

I'll do it like Reddit 10 years ago... wander in, poke around, make a snarky comment or 4 and see where it goes.

I was a bit confused about the place at first too. Here's a comment I copy-pasted from a previous post of mine:

My friend gave me a great explanation:

• Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

• “Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

• When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

• If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community

• When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from

• Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately

• c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml

• Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.

Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit