It’s possible to use this place without developing an understanding of how it works, but you’ll experience a lot of friction if you end up in some kind of edge case.

Like, with the Twitter migration, it became clear that a lot of people’s mental model for federation was actually a mainframe/terminal model, which makes questions like “Why can’t I search posts on [other site]?!?” make sense if you don’t recognize that [other site] is a different website. Once you grok that, it becomes like asking why you can’t search Facebook posts from etsy. But the mainframe model actually posits that there’s a singular place (called “Mastodon” to Twitter migrants, and “Lemmy” or “kbin” for newcomers from Reddit) that you’re accessing via some kind of dumb terminal, and certain things (discovery, defederation, etc.) will just appear fundamentally broken when viewed through that lens.