I can say first hand I was confused on how to sign up. I tried joining lemmy.ml and wrote up an application which never got approved. After browsing for a few days I figured out I could sign up on any instance and found lemmy.ca, my people. lol. My application got approved very quickly there.

I doubt most people will be able to figure this out as it’s not intuitive and perhaps give up and move on to somewhere else. :(