I feel like a much talked about criticism of getting started with Lemmy is that the ‘average person’ doesn’t understand it. I see a lot of technical people, myself included, use words that the ‘average person’ shies away from. Mentioning concepts like servers and Fediverse requires some background knowledge. I propose we start using ‘providers’ instead of servers, as it helps understand the function of it instead of the implementation. There might be more words that could be confusing, so let’s have a conversation about them. Are there any you recognize as being able to be simplified, or is this a non issue?
Your metaphor of multiple instances = multiple “Reddits” is exactly how I think of it as a layperson!
A few other people use the email metaphor, but I found it not as digestible since email is not a forum.