First of all, welcome! Hope you'll like it here.

Politics surely seems to drown the regular conversations at times. But some niche communities are quite active! Places like !newcommunities@lemmy.world , as well as general search might be of great help in finding your gems.

As per federation and stuff, I think Mastodon of all places does a more or less decent job on boarding new users, and Lemmy has a lot to learn from it.

Regardless, the core idea is that there are plenty of various interconnected physical servers operated by different people. A simple and rough analogy is e-mail, which is actually also federated. You may have your mailbox somewhere like Gmail, and I can have mine in Outlook or even host my own (and you can do that with Lemmy, too). But we'll be able to write to each other like if we use same service.

Here, everything is organized in a way as to allow not only private communication, but public discussion. Posts and comments are public and can be seen by everyone from the server the post is made on.

For example:

• You connect to a server under the lemmy.ca domain. So, some Canadian guy just rents/owns a physical server and puts Lemmy software on it.
• I connect to rekabu.ru, hosted by a guy somewhere in Russia. Same idea.
• The post is in the community on the lemmy.world server, which is a third one.
• Our servers connect to lemmy.world, where the post is made, and exchange information with it. My server sends my comments, your server sends yours, and so we can see each other despite connecting to different places.
• Should I send you a direct message instead, it will go straight from rekabu.ru to lemmy.ca, just like e-mail. And vice versa.