I'm not sure I yet understand the difference between "local" and "federated" timelines.
@Stonekettle It appears (on my feed) that local is only English language. Federated is not.
@Stonekettle I just learned that my assumptoin was wrong, thanks to the "How-to" article someone listed. Local is only the people in your instance (like a Hogwarts House), federated is everyone.
@Stonekettle - The Local Timeline only shows public posts made by users on your home instance. - The Federated Timeline shows all public posts from all users "known" to your instance. This means the user is either on the same instance as you, or somebody on your instance follows that user.
I see I'm going to have to learn some new terms.
@Stonekettle here is a link to thier documentation area - https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/User-guide.md
@Stonekettle Local is the server you signed up with, and federated is the timelines from all the servers that people you follow are signed up with. Given that it is possible (and desirable?) to have multiple accounts on different servers (instances, actually) it's entirely possible for multiple people to have the same usernames on your federated timeline. I think.
@Stonekettle As I get it, "Local" is the timeline just on this individual server, while "Federated" is the collective timeline of all servers across all of Mastodonspace.
@JustPlainDave @Stonekettle
If you use Federated, you will probably get overwhelmed, and many of the postings are in languages other than English.
The local timeline is full of all the public messages (essentially any message that isn't a reply, or isn't intentionally semi-private) that were sent by people who also go to octodon.social to sign in, like you.
The federated timeline is public messages sent by anyone and everyone.
Your Home stream is public and follower-only and replies sent by people you follow.
@ghedipunk Cool. Thanks for the info. I'm getting the hang of it.
@Stonekettle I may be mistaken, but I believe it is that local is the instance that you are on, and federated is all instances.
@Stonekettle from the official faq "It's complicated, but short version is: “toots from people that you and other locals follow.”" instances can only show up in the federated timeline if the two instances allow federation with each other. Not all instances are federated
@Stonekettle Allows you to bring in status updates from other platforms that a joined (aka federated) to this one.