This is correct. While it's true that running your own instance is far from simple if you don't have server experience, in my opinion it's the ideal way to interact with the fediverse. I run my own instance, so I know my content is regularly backed up and I have access to the entire fediverse (many larger instances will block other instances at the server level for moderation reasons, so users on those servers are unable to see any content from the blocked instance).

As for community, you have to seek out users on other servers to follow in order to bootstrap yourself, but once you've done that, their posts will federate to your instance and vice versa. You can also go directly to other sites and copy the thread link into your instance to interact with it, or if the site supports it, you can log in via OAuth with your own account and interact natively with the content on the other instance.