Had to experience that first hand. I tried to get my best friends to register on my Matrix server last September and join a room for our group, and they did, but I rarely see any of them online and I only get responses days later, if at all. One even stopped using it entirely, lol. Ah well, but at least I got a Matrix server out of that that I can use to federate with other like-minded people.

All of this is confusing af

Where did you get that from? Why should Lemmy be hostile to that? We often get posts about donating to valuable projects and such.