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There are three timelines: - Home Timeline: The people you follow - Local Timeline: The people on your instance - Fed Timeline: The people on the fediverse

There are three timelines: - Home Timeline: The people you follow - Local Timeline: The people on your instance - Fed Timeline: The people on the fediverse You take your pick. Be as siloed as you want. On the fed timeline, block people and instances, or just let the unfiltered hive mind flow over you. When you want something quieter, go to the local or home timelines.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Keep in mind that your local view of the Federated timeline is instance dependent. The Federated timeline is best described as "all content from other instances by profiles followed by accounts on your own instance". If you're running, say, a single-user instance, the "Federated" and "Home" timelines will be identical. If you're on a large instance, the Federated timeline will be fairly comprehensive (and tends to clock along quite quickly). If you're on a smaller instance, the timeline will generally be far smaller. And of course, if your instance restricts (through any of various levels of blocking) remote instances or accounts, the Federated timeline will lack those as well. Put another way: there's no such thing as a "universal" Fediverse feed, at least not without some very heavy-handed (and widely discourage) automated following.
- vidarh 4y ago
  There's the added complication of relays: For smaller instances in particular, relays can fill in the federated timeline.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Right, though I'm familiar with that only in theory. Are there relay instances / pointers on how that works?
    - vidarh 4y ago
      This has some (very basic) info: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of an instance, and a shared inbox that accepts things that doesn't have a single recipients. Now all you need is a message pump that takes things posted to its inbox and passes it on to all the subscribers of the relay.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Thanks. And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding. Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally. One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept. Reading now ... And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances. I find the "instances wanting to relay subscribe to the service" aspect interesting, and intelligent.
        vidarh 4y ago
        Yeah, hub and spoke absolutely makes sense. I think in general, though, the relays are a bit of a hack in the sense that they're papering over poor discoverability and search mostly. It makes sense to have some nodes on the network with the ability to serve up search results for a reasonable fraction of the network, but most small instances have only very limited use for taking a large feed once people have followed what they want. There's the option of doing more with relays, such as ones offered filtered subsets out.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        Mastodon search is so limited anyway that it's almost a non-issue. Though relays for tracking hashtags and finding members of smaller instances should be useful.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Keep in mind that your local view of the Federated timeline is instance dependent. The Federated timeline is best described as "all content from other instances by profiles followed by accounts on your own instance". If you're running, say, a single-user instance, the "Federated" and "Home" timelines will be identical. If you're on a large instance, the Federated timeline will be fairly comprehensive (and tends to clock along quite quickly). If you're on a smaller instance, the timeline will generally be far smaller. And of course, if your instance restricts (through any of various levels of blocking) remote instances or accounts, the Federated timeline will lack those as well. Put another way: there's no such thing as a "universal" Fediverse feed, at least not without some very heavy-handed (and widely discourage) automated following.

vidarh 4y ago
There's the added complication of relays: For smaller instances in particular, relays can fill in the federated timeline.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Right, though I'm familiar with that only in theory. Are there relay instances / pointers on how that works?
  - vidarh 4y ago
    This has some (very basic) info: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays https://joinfediverse.wiki/Fediverse_relays As far as I understand it (and with the caveat I've only recently started digging into the protocols) the general concept is that ActivityPub basically has inboxes you post to, and outboxes containing the public feed, which you can follow (asking them to post you stuff), so a relay just needs an outbox that contains the full public feed of an instance, and a shared inbox that accepts things that doesn't have a single recipients. Now all you need is a message pump that takes things posted to its inbox and passes it on to all the subscribers of the relay.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Thanks. And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding. Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally. One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept. Reading now ... And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances. I find the "instances wanting to relay subscribe to the service" aspect interesting, and intelligent.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Yeah, hub and spoke absolutely makes sense. I think in general, though, the relays are a bit of a hack in the sense that they're papering over poor discoverability and search mostly. It makes sense to have some nodes on the network with the ability to serve up search results for a reasonable fraction of the network, but most small instances have only very limited use for taking a large feed once people have followed what they want. There's the option of doing more with relays, such as ones offered filtered subsets out.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        Mastodon search is so limited anyway that it's almost a non-issue. Though relays for tracking hashtags and finding members of smaller instances should be useful.