Hey all. Love federation, think it might play a big role in saving society (unless we destroy it by way of climate change).
2 question about the federation here
1: The fact that I only see a tiny fraction of the toots of people on other Mastodon instances is surely a bug that will be fixed soon, right? It's not meant to be this way?
2: It's possible to follow other social networks using GNU Social, not just Mastodon instances, right?
Thanks! :)
@forteller Hi. Welcome to the party! o/
My best educated guesses:
1.) Sometimes the queue clogs. Time solves this. Connections also need to be established among different nodes, and I think this may impact your TL. If other users on your instance are not connected to any users on others, it might not show anything. Also, other instances could be blacklisted. Depends on instance's policy.
2.) Not sure what the current status of that is, but think it should be possible. Basically uses OStatus.
…you know because if not it's not actually federation, just decentralization, which just isn't enough.
@forteller The way the federated timeline works is that it's essentially the combined Home timelines of everyone from your instance.
For example, the federated timeline on octodon.social is the combined Home timelines of everyone on octodon.social. Your Home timeline consists of people you follow, from both octodon.social and other instances.
And yes, it's possible to follow people from other, non-Mastodon instances.
@forteller In short, if you want to see more toots from people from other instances, follow people from other instances and then everyone from your instance will see them as well.
@forteller On following people from GNU Social: https://karp.id.au/social/en/user/exploring.html#remote-follow
Same steps work for Mastodon instances.
@bvtsang That's great! Seeing quitter.no in that example I wonder if I can import my old posts from Identi.ca in here… That would be awesome!
@bvtsang @tim Thanks for the replies! But this doesn't seem quite right from my experience here. For example, when I look at the profile @tfj here on my Octodon tootsuite I only see 11 toots, but in reality he's actually got 361. And there's plenty more examples like that. https://octodon.social/media/HEEfIxFUDVFWtNjDULw
@forteller @bvtsang @tfj @tim accounts only begin existing to your server when someone follows them
@sonya @bvtsang @tfj @tim Ok, then I understand better. I still feel like that is an issue that should be addressed, though.
But there's something that still doesn't make sense: Why do I see the first 4 toots in @yoz's thread to Twitter users, and not the last? Shouldn't it rather be the other way around then?
@forteller
1) Inter-instance communication is pretty much black magic. It's sort of well defined in the OStatus spec, but Mastodon doesn't entirely comply with that.
2) Yup.
@raffitz What? What's the point of standards if people just comply halfheartedly? :/
@forteller You should join @maiyannah
@raffitz @maiyannah Thanks for the tip! Followed. :)
@forteller
1. Federated feeds include the local feed + toots from any remote users who are followed by at least 1 person on the local instance.
2. I *think* so but can't definitively answer this :slight_smile: