Okay, here's how I explained it to my kid.
You've got the united states, that's lemmy.
You've got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.
Communities are cities.
Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they're working on the same basic principles.
The fediverse is the UN.
It ain't exactly right, but it ain't exactly wrong :)
Yup, and via hermit as well.
It has benefits over jerboa in that everything works right.
But jerboa is a better overall experience because of the way it uses the screen in a balanced way. Coming from reddit 3rd party apps, browsers and PWAs are so clunky. Even old reddit suffers from that, though. New reddit at least is visually closer to app layouts.
Which is tangential. But until jerboa catches up, it's going to be glitchy, which is annoying in its own right, like some community links just crashing the app.