There are a lot of explainers on how Lemmy works out there, and honestly? They're all terrible. You've probably heard the phrase "well, it's like email", which somehow, leaves you with more questions than answers.
So, how the fuck does this shit work? Well...
It's just Reddit, but on multiple servers.
No really, that's it. Each lemmy 'instance' is its own reddit. It has users, communities (sub reddits) posts, and so on. If all the other lemmy instances were to go offline except this one, you'd still have a fully functional reddit. Just emptier.
Imagine if reddit had separate domains responsible for hosting groups of communites. Like, maybe one would have /r/aww and /r/pics, and other might have /r/badwomensanatomy and /r/twoxchromosomes. Each would have different global rules which applied to everything on that domain.
The special sauce is that other lemmy servers all share their data. This is the part that everyone refers to as 'like email'. This means, to access