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/[email protected]

• 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

but then i am a bit confused, if i can use an account on every instance, why is there an option to make accounts per instance in the first place?

Why isn't there a centralised account log in, and then you select what instances you want to browse?

Also what happens if say, two people have the same username, but are on different instances?

sorry for the myriad of questions i am still new to this whole thing