I completely agree. It was super confusing figuring out how to access communities from other servers, and I consider myself a very tech-literate person. The Digg -> reddit transition didn't require understanding a whole new paradigm when signing up.

Putting it in terms of email is the simplest to me. And it works because email itself is federated.

You join a server (gmail, aol, yahoo, proton mail, whatever provider you choose), and from there you can communicate with any other email provider. You aren’t locked into only talking to gmail users.

It does make discovering new communities a little more difficult because they won’t show up for your local feed by default, but that can be handled down the road a little ways to put that all in the background and link all the servers so that the experience for the user is similar to how Reddit used to be.

I definitely agree with this. I'm a very tech-savvy person and while I think I understand how it all works, I am confident there are plenty of people that will look at Lemmy and the fediverse and go "uhhhh...nope I guess?"

That's unfortunate.

My understanding is (and if I'm wrong, someone please correct me) instances/servers are like little towns with their own communities. But you're not limited to just your town and your communities. You're free to visit any town and join any of their communities.

I'm sure it's much more convoluted than that, this was just my simple understanding of it.

The confusion is the signup process and front page

If when you joined instead of picking a user name it was username @lemmy.world or @beehaw.org then people would see it more like an email address.

Then when you reach the front page instead of showing server admin picks, it should show a list of popular communities across servers and then the alternative local version with some text at the top explaining multiple versions of some communities exist and you can subscribe to both.