It should be said that the version number is more of an indication than anything specific. I don’t think it would be hard for an instance to spoof its version number.

Also, lemm.ee in particular has a few mods and tricks that might not be in the lemmy codebase yet - @[email protected] has previously included new code he has pushed to the main stack before it has been accepted. This allowed us to have working versions of things before other instances.

Point being, two instances with the same version can have different code and implementations.