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Every server lets you follow (just about) whoever you want, that's the important nature of Federation. If you mean specifically "the firehose" of the public Twi

Every server lets you follow (just about) whoever you want, that's the important nature of Federation. If you mean specifically "the firehose" of the public Twitter feed, the Federated Timeline of an instance is generally pretty close firehose of its own (it shows every public toot known to the instance from all the servers it "sees"), depending on instance size you join. Join a large instance and the Local and Federated Timelines both can give you a Twitter-like "firehose". Some of the crazier, larger instances even have bots trying to follow every public account on every server they can find to make their Federated Timeline "as complete as possible". I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist.

criddell 6y ago
> I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist. I think the point is to make it as close to Twitter as possible. Internally, Twitter itself must be a federation of servers, right?
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  That's just it, though, I don't understand why you'd want to "make it as close to Twitter as possible". From at least one point of view, the whole point to move to something like Mastodon is to move to something improved over Twitter and recreating incidental parts of Twitter like a single "public master feed" isn't necessary. It's that centralized, combined fire hose of a "public feed" that I don't understand the point of in 2020 (other than for ethically questionable reasons). In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.

criddell 6y ago

> I don't personally recommend joining an instance like that I don't really see a point in that, but such servers exist. I think the point is to make it as close to Twitter as possible. Internally, Twitter itself must be a federation of servers, right?

WorldMaker 6y ago
That's just it, though, I don't understand why you'd want to "make it as close to Twitter as possible". From at least one point of view, the whole point to move to something like Mastodon is to move to something improved over Twitter and recreating incidental parts of Twitter like a single "public master feed" isn't necessary. It's that centralized, combined fire hose of a "public feed" that I don't understand the point of in 2020 (other than for ethically questionable reasons). In fact, as a Twitter early adopter I watched the public feed go from a useless but sometimes interesting curio that sometimes had fun surprises to a useless fire hose full of uninteresting garbage and not worth sifting through. The Federated Timeline on every Mastodon instance gets that wild that most people turn off or ignore the Federated Timeline. I certainly find it even more pointless to use bots to try to ramp that fire hose all the way up to "as much of the network as possible at all times". I just cannot see an ethical use of that today, and I cannot see why someone would want that when Twitter itself proves that a single massive public feed is way more of a bug than a feature.