@smeraldo_nz hey welcome! its ok to feel a bit lost at first, you’ll figure things out pretty quickly (and if not there’s always people around happy to answer questions!)
if you haven’t opened the local timeline yet, you should check it out! It shows all the (public) posts made by people on your instance, so its a good place to make friends as a new user :)
@dancingfool @smeraldo_nz are you using the website? there should be a set of icons across the top of the screen to help you navigate — the house is home (people you follow), the bell is notifications, the one that looks like three people is local (posts from your instance), and the globe is federated (every post your instance knows about — this will be very busy and sometimes contain weird stuff haha)