Most of these are specifically Linux or developer things. While they are nerds, they’re just one very specific subset of the nerd kingdom. You don’t necessarily need to know what these are unless you’re getting into self-hosting, Linux, or software development.

Federated is the only term that might be useful to a general Lemmy user. It just describes the way that Lemmy talks to itself (through instances sharing posts with each other to make the separate websites run as one service) or to other services like Mastodon or the like, which are part of the larger “Fediverse.”

Docker: it’s a container used as a sort of sandbox environment for running various tools

Federated: uses the activitypub protocol

Self host: Don’t use services in the cloud. Build your own

Fork: Derived from existing project (or process)

Container: Sandboxed part of your OS

Instance: There are multiple definitions but the one probably most relevant to you is a node of a federated network

Flatpak: No idea. I think this is Ubuntu’s containerized deliverable

Tailscale: I think this is a reverse proxy?

Distro: A flavor of Linux

Wayland: Succesor to X11. Gives you graphics on Linux

Nginx: Web server software. Alternative to Apache