I recently migrated or better yet am still in the process of migrating from feddit.de to dataterm.digital. I really like it here and probably will stay here but I’ve been wondering about the difference in the “all” feed when comparing the 2 instances. On feddit.de’s “all” feed I see many more new posts than on dataterm.digital’s “all” feed. (I’m comparing sorted by new)

Can someone explain to me why that is and what’s happening there? Shouldn’t I be seeing the same posts regardless of the instances, given the instance isn’t defederated?

  • pionaiki@dataterm.digitalEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    There exist ActivityPub relays that are basically already filled indexes that you can connect to a Mastodon instance. This is what it says in the admin settings:

    A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers.