Every instance has a list of instances that it is federated with (that the server sees). Feddit.de is a bigger instance than dataterm.digital, it has more users, which means that it is federated with more instances. It doesn’t mean that you can’t view the instances from here. You can paste the !community@instance.tld to the dataterm searchbar and if this community wasn’t on the federated list it now will be. That’s why more users = more posts on the All feed.
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: