Hey I'm the coship guy (coshipmate?). I also found out the hard way the lemmy api doesn't respond if you're missing some parameters. Actually the most helpful thing was opening up photon and just seeing the network requests it sent.
I’ve used a few platforms in my life and am currently mainly on Mastodon and Pixelfed, but Reddit, the role model for Lemmy, was never one of them. It seemed very confusing and complex to me and I had the same feeling with Lemmy. It’s all a bit different from Mastodon, but that’s mainly because you have to deal with another level here, the communities.
Yeah funny how that works. I find twitter, and thus mastodon very confusing. There's no organization or discoverability except what's added on by hashtags (very inconsistent) or algorithms (don't exist on mastodon).
Lemmy doesn't care about users, only communities. You can't even follow them (which can be quite annoying when things like wordpress join the fediverse, but make blogs "users" even though they can have multiple authors, and now you can't follow them through lemmy)