Ask Lemmy
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Works largely the same as reddit, just smaller and more distributed.
The go-to analogy is e-mail. You pick a particular e-mail provider, say gmail.com or yahoo.com, and create your account there, but that doesn't stop you from sending messages to anyone with any other provider, or them sending messages to you. In the fediverse/lemmyverse/whatever, same thing, you create an account on whatever server/instance you feel like, and use that to see posts and messages from any other server/instance in the network.
Occasionally, you might hear the term "federation" which is the process of different servers/instances syncing their content with each other. It's not foolproof, and sometimes doesn't work properly. But generally, you won't have to care about the nuts and bolts of the protocol.
Other consideration I've become aware of with time:
Some instances are defederated from many others. I've had to look to find one that isn't. I want the option to block instances but don't want the decision made for me. I forget the resource someone gave me for this.
I've had to look for an instance that seems stable enough and not at risk of being killed off or going down for extended periods without maintainance. I had accounts on Lemm.ee and the NSFW instance that were both killed off.
You've mentioned smaller numbers (which isn't a bad thing). But the distributed nature is an issue for me. Communities are not unified and you get multiple small communities across multiple instances and a very fragmented userbase.
Some apps or even fediverse instances like PieFed can help with the fragmentation of communities. In PieFed's case, you can create or follow "Feeds" which combine multiple communities into 1. It also combines anything that's been cross-posted so that you can see the comments from any crosspost all in the same place.