[nerdbert]

Exactly my experience and why I haven't signed up for Lemmy. I don't know what the hell any of those communities are and why/how I should pick one particular one as my home base or whatever, and not getting involved at all seemed like the easiest way forward.

I get the sense that there are a lot of competing visions for what Lemmy should be, and I am not interested enough to put myself in the middle of that.

There's probably an opportunity to start a modified instance that avoids all this identity stuff and hides the federation aspect as much as possible to make it look like a seamless unified community. That's something I, and I presume many others who were turned off by their first experience with it, might well join.