Well these are all nerd terms, because most of the community in here consists of IT guys and people who use Linux, most of the time they are the same. You don’t need to know what Docker, Self host, Fork, Container, Flatpak, Tailscale, Distro, Wayland and Nginx is, unless you are interested in IT.

Knowing Federated and Instance could be beneficial for the Lemmy users I think.

• Federated: Imagine you are the resident of town X, and you frequently communicate and engage in town X, but you can also communicate with your best friend who lives in town Y, and your parents who reside in town Z. This is how Lemmy and Mastodon works instead of social media like Reddit, FB, Insta etc etc, where with my analogue the residents live in 1 capital city with no towns to talk with, and having to abide by their rules, whereas different towns may have different laws.
• Instance: Following my analogue an instance is a town of this federated world. For example you are the resident of sh.itjust.works town and I’m living in sopuli.xyz