It bothers me that people find it out so supremely confusing and it's definitely an issue that needs to be addressed because it's definitely keeping people away. The fact of the matter is, you can go to any Lemmy instance and get that front page experience because the r/all equivalent of each instance shows threads from every other instance (minus defederated, etc but that's beside the point).

Sync helps in that it is a familiar and polished look and feel for those who used third party Reddit apps, but outside of that it's just another Lemmy app.

Probably the biggest factor in the confusion is fediverse terms being used to describe the fediverse, which is basically speaking nonsense if you don't already understand it.

There's this: Lemmy is a federated link aggregator where anyone can start an instance and communities within that instance and all the instances can communicate and share information. Doesn't it sound amazing?

Then there's this: Lemmy is like a version of Reddit where there's a whole bunch of separate reddit dot coms. You can sign up for whichever one you like to be your home "reddit". The reddits are all connected, so you can subscribe to subreddits on the other reddits while just logged into your home. You can also post to them, comment, and see the posts and comments from your home.

I'm sure there's some analogy out there that really boils it down well much better than mine, so please share if you think of one.