2006 Our Highschool had "recycled" some of the older machines and it started from there.
A Dell Optiplex GX1 500MHz, with 128mb of ram, and a 80gb IDE HHD. Installed Debian Sarge, This was running a dial-up gateway for our home network as well as samba.
It allowed one machine to be the LANs internet connection, abet slow. Samba was so I could download installers once, and then pull them from the network drive.
2008-2012 that machine was a dedicated WordPress machine. Around 2019 I pulled it out of the closet and powered it up. The whole site was there, still ran without a hiccup. It was actually recycled shortly after that, Dell used to make great hardware.
I am new to the fediverse, and could have misconfigured my docker image. But, I have de-sync issues the same way. What I started doing is browsing other Lemmy instances directly. Because my subscription does not seem to pull all content and all comments. It picks and chooses to sync about 4 or 5 post out of the ~50 a day from my 6ish different subscriptions.
I am not totally sure how the software talks back and forth between instances. But, it seems like a huge issue if instances don't have a feature to stay in sync.