Think of your instance you signed up as as your email provider. Using that email you can send messages to anyone else who has an email. You do not have to pick a specific email provider to use email, gmail, hotmail etc they can all talk to each other. Lemmy works in a similar way except it not limited to DMs, the instance you sign up for allows you to talk to people across all Lemmy instances and see posts from other instances. When you go to “All” on Lemmy you are seeing all posts across all instances. When you go to Local, you are only seeing your home instance.

Happened to my mom IRL too, way back before I was born, in like 1970 her sister gave her a set of three elephants that she displayed on a shelf by the front door. People coming over thought she liked elephants so people started gifting her elephants. By the time I was born she had a full fledged elephant collection, multiple shelves worth. I even added to it when I was a kid because I thought the same thing until she told me one day that she doesn’t really have any type of interest in elephants, it was a collection that other people made for her.

Been checking and commenting on Lemmy everyday since I made my account. Its my new first opened app of the day now