so can someone​explain again how federated timelines are supposed to work? I heard "if someone on your instance follows someone on another instance, that external person shows up in the timeline" but then also boosts seem to play in and a lot of users who aren't followed by or following anyone on my instance and have no boosts are showing up?
I really really don't understand it and that frustrates me with core features like this

@Fidgetcetera It is very simple. Let me help to explain. A toot must ether:

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A). Be from someone on your instance,

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B). Be from someone who your instance is monitoring, because someone on your instance follows them,

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or C). be boosted by someone that your instance is monitoring.

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Those are the only ways. Sometimes, toots have inaccurate information, because of the nature of the distributed system. It can look like they where not boosted.

@NthTensor Okay, so let's take this example. https://mstdn.jp/users/hatenapluse/updates/545433 showed up in my federated timeline. It has no boosts according to either the web client here on simstim.club OR mstdn.jp's page. Scrolling through their followers, no one on simstim.club follows them.
This happens very regularly, to the point where my only guess is someone is boosting and unboosting toots en masse?

@Fidgetcetera The web client is, unfortunately, not accurate. Any given instance can only track the boost /on that given instance/.

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Boosts on other instances do not require communication with the server of origin, and so are very hard to track.

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By design, it is almost impossible to track, from the server of origin, where and how toots propagate to.

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The server or origin is only in charge of the initial dispatch.

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Assume there was boosting somewhere.

@NthTensor Nevermind, I figured it out thanks to this post. https://mastodon.art/users/Curator/updates/112
There was one user being followed by one person who was mass auto-replying to users, thus causing the original post to federate.