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In layman's terms, comparing it to email seems the easiest way to explain.
"It's like a distributed Reddit with a bunch of instances that are run by different people, and they all talk to one another. Some people have an email address with gmail.com, some have yahoo.com, some have protonmail.com, etc, but they can all email one another. Lemmy instances share each others' posts in a similar way."
This is also how I explain it... It's crazy how all these centralized services have made something as old and simple as email seem foreign to people. I'll explain it this way, and still get something like, "but this is a website". To which I say "so is gmail.com"