@judgethree Sure!

but I'm not Someone, I'm Andrew. Hi, nice to meet you, thank you for responding to my toot.

You're on a server called ohai.social.

I'm on a server called retro.social.

These servers are not run by the same people. Different hardware, different rules, different administrators.

They are "federated" in that they all participate in the same network (or parts of the same network) but are all managed independently.

We're not fully peer-to-peer, not every user is running their own activeitypub compatible server, but we aren't fully centralized either. We're federated, we're in a federation.

Does that make sense, or should I try a different tactic?