Since you didn’t quite get an answer, an “instance” is like a “website” kind of. Just like you’d go to Reddit and have access to all of the subreddits on their servers, an instance is a one version of Reddit. There are multiple “Reddits” like lemmy.world, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc that all have their own “subreddits”. They all interact with each other though so you can see every community on every instance as long as they’re still linked.

Yea, but that is how most large organizations fail. Just by sheer inertia they continue to exist. Digg failed because of Digg, not because of Reddit.

Same here, there’s a couple that I go back to browse because the community is still there but I’m mostly here now.