I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an ‘@’ and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I’ve been using the whole time!
Finding communities can be painful indeed, and there are a few other wrinkles that I hope will be ironed out over time, like having the ability to hard delete posts and comments and having a setting to disable autorefresh.