Oh wow congrats, like half the world writes software, I also write software for a living, but I don't confuse the admins running my software and using my admin portals with the primary users of my software who will determine whether or not it will be popular or a success.
Back up and examine the context of the conversation and then stop with this pointless semantic distinction. In the context of whether or not your social network software will be successful, an admin setting that allows one instance to connect to other is not a user facing feature.
People do not open Reddit to examine how the Reddit admins configured their kubernetes clusters, so stop with this dumb bullshit pretending like users care about federation. They want somewhere to come have a discussion with everyone else interested in the same thing. That's it.