Any mast admins want to weigh in on how to connect to other servers? There is nothing I can find in the UI that has anything to do with this. Hidden URL? Config file someplace??
@CobaltVelvet Yeah, how to you get your server uh ... federated (whee verbing is fun) with other servers. A default instance is just an island.
@skroo yea that happens when you follow people. The federated timeline is basically a timeline made of everyone on the instance's followings. And if someone on another server follows you, you appear on their federated timeline.
@CobaltVelvet So if I export my follow list from Octodon and import it to my instance it will start populating that in theory?
@CobaltVelvet Cool, thanks.
@CobaltVelvet @skroo wait. Really? So I'm only seeing the parts of octodon.social that others on my instance are following, and nothing outside of that scope? That's not how I expected it to work. I expected to see everything by default in federated view.
@CobaltVelvet leaves me with one big question though; how am I able to explore an instance's "local" timeline without registering there? (Mastodon.social comes to mind). Because it sounds like I'm missing a lot of messages from people I'm not following this way. And I don't know who to follow without seeing their messages 😜
@robin I don't think there's a way for now, but you can search for mastodon.social on your instance and that will list a few people. The you can look at their followings/followers and find people that way.
@CobaltVelvet thanks for taking the time to explain 👍
@skroo you mean federation? that's made of followings/followers