Don't worry, you'll catch on soon enough. Just canoodle around until something interesting hits you and then follow the "how federation works" rabbit hole until it stops making sense. Rinse and repeat. Remember that things are still in flux, so you'll probably run into bugs at some point. Using the platform gets significantly easier once you can identify what proper operation.
For example, if I let a kbin thread sit in a background tab for too long, it loses sync with the server. Once I reach the tab, and interaction that deals with storage (voting, commenting, etc.) brings me to 1 or 2 error pages. At first I thought this was a problem with which instance I joined or some federation thing I didn't understand. Nope. It's a minor bug. Just needed to refresh the page to get around it.
The fediverse is getting better and more stable every day. There's still a lot to be done, but the devs are doing a solid job. A couple weeks ago there were 300 kbin users. Now there are 235,000. Lemmy went from 50k to 1.5m. That's crazy!