If by websites you mean instances, then currently close to 1250. Here is a list of them for you.
Oh my goodness.
The list in the second link there says there are 988 "nodes" (presumably the same as instances). Any idea why there is this discrepancy?
Honestly, I'm unsure about the discrepancy, unfortunately.
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A good place to look (not limited to just Lemmy instances): fedidb.org
They are called instances. One instance can have multiple servers as backup.
Example: An instance can have a server in New York State and California, if the New York server caught fire, they can redirect you to the California backup server.
And one server can host multiple instances 👍
That too, but I hope we aren't doing that since one fire would take out multiple instances.
Which, let's be honest, is not the case with most instances... not trolling, just saying 🤷.
That kinda sucks, but my point was to clarify the terminology, not claiming that some Lemmy instances have multiple servers.
So servers are sort of batteries for instances/websites, right?
Youre right. "Servers" are just computers that do all the work behind a website.
But when it comes to lemmy people sometimes use "server" and "instance" to refer to the same thing: what lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and others are.
I don't know the answer to the title, so I'll answer the body. The answer is "it depends".
If you're talking to someone in a technical setting, then servers are the physical machines. The computers themselves, sitting in a room somewhere. Or maybe a virtual server that pretends to be a physical machine, but runs on a real server that sits in a room somewhere. Whereas a website is some location you can put into a web browser and get content that "feels" like it's all one thing.
The reason this distinction matters is because you can host multiple small websites on a single server. For example there's no reason a particular machine couldn't host 10 different lemmy instances, if it's got enough processing power.
But on the other hand a popular website may have its work spread across multiple servers. Maybe I've got a database server, which is a machine that only runs the database. And then maybe I have a few different web servers that actually serve "the webpage", but I've also got a cache server that stores part of the webpage and serves that when it can, etc. Websites like Facebook or Twitter are considered one website but have thousands and thousands of servers.
But if you're talking to someone in a non-technical setting, yeah they're basically the same.
The Fediverse is essentially a collection of platforms (such as Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and more). Each platform has a number of instances that are hosted separately, hence the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. For example, Lemmy is a platform, and Lemmy instances include Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, kbin.social, sh.itjust.works, and more. Others have posted links to lists of instances that you can look through.
