Like many others, I created accounts on a few different instances to try things out. Using apps like Liftoff and Jerboa make it very convenient to switch between accounts, but I’ve noticed that I get different posts showing up when browsing All, even with the same sort settings.

Can someone explain why that would be? I don’t think any of the instances I’m on are defederated, so shouldn’t I see the same posts across different instances?

  • @WanderA
    33•1 year ago

    The All timeline shows posts from communities that have at least one user from that instance subscribed to them.

    If no users from instance A are subscribed to community X, this community will never show up in that instance’s All timeline.

    This is because otherwise instances have no idea what communities are out there. It isn’t until a user subscribes to a remote community that the instance starts receiving posts for that community and learns that it exists.

    When a user subscribes to a remote commmunity, the remote instance starts sending updates for content that’s newly created for that community and the user’s instance knows it exists and is able to display that received content in the ALL timeline.

      • @WanderA
        16•1 year ago

        Mastodon has something called relays which are servers that share all posts from one instance to another. It’ll eventually come to Lemmy as well.

      • MentalEdge
        11•1 year ago

        It’s not a problem. It’s by design. But yes, more users and more subs will mean more stuff gets interconnected.

        But the idea is that this way, each instance only needs to store the content that at least one user on it interested in.

        If no-one on a server wants a certain community on another, the instance never even bothers with it.

        • The Quuuuuill
          7•1 year ago

          It also means that if you’re, let’s say, on an instance that’s very specifically focused on realistic ecological changes, such as, I don’t know, slrpnk.net, you’re going to be more likely to stumble into a community you might be interested in on the all feed since everyone on your instance is also interested in realistic sustainability.

          • @[email protected]
            8•1 year ago

            This is really the biggest reason that instances with more specific focus make more sense than every instance being a huge generalist melting pot. It’s important for those generalist instances to exist, too, but the smaller special-interest instances serve an important purpose.

            • The Quuuuuill
              7•1 year ago

              I view the general purpose instances as either a starting point or as a home base. Even then, the general purpose instances all have their distinct flavors. Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, beehaw.org, and sh.itjust.works DO NOT appeal all to the same people, but they still represent for many the same totem within the fediverse. These are the general purpose home base instances that people sign up for at first, start exploring, discovering communities, and perhaps learning that one thing or another about their home base’s moderation style isn’t quite right for them. Maybe sh.itjust.works takes too long to decide to do something, perhaps beehaw.org defederates from an instance with good communities because that instance has too many users on it to moderate the people that even that other instance owner wishes weren’t on them, potentially lemm.ee is too open in its federation policy for you. You learn these things as you explore. Along the way, too, you’ll discover that maybe the lemmy.dbzer0.com crowd or the slrpnk.net crowd consistently are saying things you find insightful, interesting, or that you agree with, so you go check out their instance and discover “hey! This is a fascinating set of specific communities and ideals. It might be this is where my second home should be” and suddenly, your Fediverse experience has become much more tailored to you.

              All of this is fantastic! And it’s only possible because the fediverse is not a collection of pooled compute resources acting as a cluster, it’s because it’s a loosely associated grouping of self-governing online gathering places.

              Oh, and, of course, there’s the ultimate ideal instance for everyone, possumpat.io. The instance for people who like possums. Which is everyone, obviously. There is no need for any other instance. The entire purpose of creating the packet-switching technologies of the 1960s that the entire internet is built on top of was to enable the creation of possumpat.io. The entire point of the death of reddit was to get people off reddit and onto possumpat.io. We have entered the post-game fuckabouts part of the sandbox simulation that is the video game we all inhabit