It means it has no server.

Yes, no server. It runs somewhere up in the clouds!

Ignore them, it's unlikely they know what they're talking about at multiple levels

I took it as a joke about cloud marketing speak.

It’s my understanding that Reddit video was PoC’d by one person using aws lambda.

Severless often gets touted as being the best way of doing things rather than just a way. My comment was a dig at that.

But it seems like my comment somehow exposes multiple levels of ignorance, would love to know what they all are!

It was unclear to me that you were being tongue-in-cheek. Were you serious, I'd point out for starters that A. You probably don't know whether it's serverless currently and B. Even if it were it's not a particularly uniquely likely explanation for consistent latency at scale

Usually that it works via "functions" like aws lambda that don't maintain a long running process, but instead start a new process for every request.

my understanding is that in a serverless architecture the dev does not manage the server, there still is one but its managed via third party cloud services who expose basic server or database functions which your app can plug into.

think a "like count" database, it needs to increment and persist. Both very simple, and its implementation is entirely decoupled from the client implementation. Firebase would manage that for you, youd just call firebase functions instead of updating a database yourself.

note: i dont know if this is how tiktok works