• Is it like anything else I might be familiar with to help me understand better? (Note: almost 70 so may need old references.)

Reddit was mentioned, but that explains the format of this site, that people post stuff and people can upvote stuff they like to make it more visible to others.

But I haven’t (so far) seen anyone mention something similar to answer the question as to why there are so many different sites here. People from lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, lemmy.nz, and others are all participating here, all on their own sites but all somehow connected.

The old (and still well used) equivalent here is email. Email is a federated service, it’s not hosted by one company, anyone can operate an email server and jn fact it’s very common. Emails look perhaps like dave@gmail.com or dave@company.com or dave@something.com. the part after the @ tells your email provider how to reach the server of the person you are emailing. You’ll notice user names can look similar to an email address, but have an @ at the beginning to identify them as separate from email addresses.

But yes, as others have mentioned, lemmy.world is the largest lemmy website, run by some people called the Fedihosting Foundation. Anyone can sign up there, and anyone can create a community there. It seems very unlikely there is an official relationship between Lemmy.world and Perchance.