Okay, think of lemmy less like reddit, and more like a bunch of reddits that can all talk to each other. Each "instance" like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, is a mini reddit. They can (and likely will) have as many communities as they want, and may have duplicate communities.

As an example, there's !sopuli.xyz/c/knives, and !lemmy.world/c/knives. Both are a community for knives and the people that like them, just like r/knives was. However, unlike reddit, two instances can have communities with the same short name of "knives", because they're different servers.

This is much like reddit having r/knives, r/knifeclub, r/pocketknives, and r/slipjoints. It's actually exactly the same as that, where each community has its own mods, own rules, and requirements.

Now, by default all of these mini reddits talk to each other. But, much like with r/the_donald, if one of these mini reddits goes crazy and starts causing trouble, it can be "banned" by other mini reddits by "defederation",which just means that other instances decide to block the crazy one.

For individual communities, you can block those as a user.

There are instances that focus on political extremes, and they are often defederated long before we r/efugees left and came to one of them.

As you may note, if you look at my user name, it is very simple for someone to find and access other instances from their "home" instance. This account is on sh.itjust.works.

On lemmy, you have three ways to view things. The first is "all". This means that you scroll through and see everything posted that your home instance is connected to. This is usually a fun way to discover communities as long as you don't mind seeing things you aren't interested in along the way.

Depending on how you access lemmy, you can subscribe to communities with a simple click or tap on the community name. It can be a bit finicky via browser because links take you to the community on its home instance. The easiest way to fix that is to add @your home instance at the end of something. As an example, sopuli.xyz/c/knives@sh.itjust.works would take me to c/knives within my home instance, and allow me to subscribe remotely rather than having to sign up on the other instance.

In most of the apps, they take care of that for you, and you can subscribe with a tap on the c/ name in a post header, then the subscribe button (though it isn't always in the same place in all apps). For someone brand new to lemmy, I recommend jerboa as the first app to try because it has the most fundamental functions in an easy to find way. Subscriptions and blocking are very easy to do.

the other two ways to view lemmy are "subscibed", and "local". The first is going to show you only communities you've subscribed to. The second will show you everything from your home instance.

To find interesting communities, there are multiple options. You can search in your app or browser (open the hamburger icon on the top right to find that function). This will pull up matches to your search term if a community matching that term has been viewed from your home instance before. Since most of the bigger instances are well linked, you're going to have options most of the time.

There's also https://lemmyverse.net which can help you find things fairly easy. There's other options, but I don't want to swamp you, and those are the two easiest.

So, it isn't as hard as it looks. The functionality is similar enough to reddit overall, and the learning curve isn't any heavier than starting to use reddit was (I remember fucking up many a time back 13 or so years ago lol, catching bans because I didn't understand things, etc).

What's more, unlike reddit, most people here will help you without picking on you. There's trolls here too, but less of them, and they tend to not do well.

The differences you're seeing and thinking are a disadvantage compared to reddit really aren't. With lemmy being decentralized and federated, what happened at reddit can't destroy lemmy. The worst that can happen is individual instances closing or being assholes enough to need defederated. You may lose an account, but it's trivial to find another instance. Seriously, because of the way reddit acted, I decided not to put al my eggs in one basket. I have accounts at all of the major instances, and some minor ones (though not under this name).

Individual instances have different signup requirements, but the first night I applied to one of the more restricted ones that require manual approval to activate the account for use, I was able to post and use the account within hours. Some instances take longer, but not more than a day or so, and it's usually the smaller ones run by a small team.

moderation is as broad as reddit is/was. Each instance has its own rules, which communities and users must abide by while using them. Each community can expand on those as needed.

Just like reddit, in other words.

Generally though, as long as you aren't being abusive, trolling heavily, or espousing extremist actions, you aren't going to run into much trouble. Even the most restrictive instances don't boot you just for cursing or being emotional. You'll almost always be warned and guided to the rules rather than banned for a first offense.

Which instance you make your home instance is mostly unimportant. Since (currently) there's only a small handful of instances that are defederated almost universally, you can access most of lemmy from any of the rest. You'd want to avoid lemmygrad and burggit.moe (the first is heavily political and in a bad way, the second allows what is called "loli" erotic art, which isn't something most folks want to associate with).

Beehaw.org has defederated more than most, and has much tighter restrictions overall, so as a home instance, it has limitations. But it's a very friendly instance with a curated community list, so it's also a great place to get your feet wet if they approve your application to join.

There's no real advantage or disadvantage to being on a smaller or larger instance for your home overall. The one you're posting from is just fine tbh. I wouldn't try switching or adding to that until you've gotten used to things a bit more.

For real, lemmy is way easier that it looks coming from reddit. Reddit has the benefit of being more established, and centralized in that regard. But driving into reddit as a new user isn't much easier at all.

Welcome to the fediverse, my r/efugee homie :). It's nice here, and there's so much fun to be had