Imagine you have a big board on your front lawn where people can come to write stuff and respond to others on the board. This board is an instance.
Your neighbor has their own board, which they have “federated” with yours. Messages from your board can show up on their board, and people there can write on those messages same as ones native to that board.
You can federate with them so their stuff shows on your board, or defederate if you don’t like the people there.
Anyone with the ability to make a board can have one federated with other boards to make a really big web of boards, but to a person looking at your lawn’s board it feels like one big one.
This is partly true. While upvoting has some effect, boosting (at least on Kbin) has a much greater effect on sorting. For example, no comments were boosted on this thread, with Omgarm’s 12 upvote comment below 1984’s 42 upvote comment when using hot sorting. I boosted Omgarm’s comment and it is now at the top of the page despite have less than half the upvotes.