I'm not sure I yet understand the difference between "local" and "federated" timelines.
@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.
@Stonekettle here is a link to thier documentation area - https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/User-guide.md