A lot of people in this thread are missing the point. Yes, there are explanations to how to use the fediverse but what this individual is lamenting is that it's so confusing that it took them two days to get to the point of posting for help, whereas on Reddit it would have taken them 10 minutes. The steep learning curve is going to stifle the growth of lemmy.

An argument can be made that those who are unwilling to learn the way that the fediverse works are important because it's simply a process of "weeding out" individuals to keep the communities great. I would argue that this argument fails to understand the point of the fediverse altogether, that if you don't like one community there are plenty of others that can be moderated to your particular standards. Also, if individuals are unable to learn Lemmy quickly enough to begin using it, they'll simply go to one of the corporate-owned social media sites. There needs to be a way for Lemmy to help new users integrate easier, rather than them having to create posts like this asking the community how to simply subscribe to a page they want to browse. Lemmy is amazing and I've really enjoyed it and am excited for its prospects, but it's got a long way to go in terms of user-friendliness before it can truly become what we all want it and know it can be- a viable alternative to corporate-owned social media.

As to your last question, the language selector (where you've selected English in your screenshot) also has an option for "undetermined". A lot of content is posted here without a language attached, so by deselecting "undetermined" you'll no longer see that content.

It's ok though, the language drop-down is a multi-select so you can pick as many languages as you want, just make sure you've also got undetermined in there.

So, I'm on a different instance - https://sh.itjust.works/ - and as the name says, at least for me, it has just worked. It's been very easy for me to understand with the interface. For looking for communities (that are not on ours or that may have more people/interaction/more established to join I have used https://browse.feddit.de/ and I have successfully joined ones that are on other instances (apologies if my terminology is not right!). I have set it to "all" and it shows me posts from all the other places that are on our list we are associated with, as I understand it.

I have also used Jerboa for mobile app browsing (I believe it is Mlem for iOS)

Aaaaand then I mess up, so still learning!

Try to visit - he’s on vlemmy.net - I can’t interact without logging in. My account doesn’t work - is it a different account for every instance?

No, but you need to access that user through your instance.

If you want to go to [email protected], go to lemmy.world/c/[email protected] not to lemmy.ml/c/gaming

To subscribe to outside communities on the instance that you signed up on, go to the search bar on your instance and type in the name of the community @ instance with an exclamation at the beginning.

For example, if you want to follow the Jokes community on lemmy.ml, you would type into your search bar: [email protected]. It will pop up and you click on it, which will take you to the community. Click on where it says sidebar and you should see the subscribe. You do this for all the communities you want to sign up for that are not apart of your instance.