You might want to check out https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy. I stumbled upon it. Beehaw defederated Lemmy.world (info.) This section on defederating may help you understand that if it's unclear.
Most of us are also new to the Fediverse, but learning every day. Welcome!
That was it exactly. Thank you.
This was a journey, so I'm documenting it here for anyone who might run into a similar situation.
I'm using a Chromebook with Linux enabled.
To confirm my version of Python I ran
python --version
:OK! Getting somewhere. So I have to check what distribution of Linux is installed with
grep '^PRETTY_NAME' /etc/os-release
Alright. Google says if I want to upgrade Python on Debian 11 I have to compile it from source. Yikes! But, wait, there's a PPA - Yay! But the PPA is for Ubuntu - Boo.
There isn't an active community for ChromeOS on Lemmy yet, but that other website has directions for replacing Debian with Ubuntu.
I'm lazy so I'm not doing that. I'm just going to spin up a temporary Ubuntu container that I can delete later, so my directions are much simpler:
Ctr-Alt-T to enter crosh, the ChromeOS developer shell.
Success! I had to escape some special characters in my passwords, but that's easily Google-able.
I'll be keeping the container around for a little while to do some periodic syncs. Then I'll remove it using crosh.