I got a big problem with the instance!
The some posts only appears when I go on the official instance of them. For example @thegreatmonarch has only few posts displayed but when you go on mastodon.social all the posts appears. Is this normal?
@downey @thegreatmonarch I forgot to say that this guy is the most important person in the world! (yes)
@Snowcode Unfortunately @thegreatmonarch hasn't posted to https://mastodon.social/@thegreatmonarch since July so it will be nearly impossible to troubleshot this issue.
Oh ok. Thabks for your reply 😃 But I don't understand why the old messages only appears when I like or repost it by going on the mastodon.social and connect it with this instance.
This is how the federation(through activity pub protocol) works. Your instance only pulls in things that its users interact with (boost, like, follow, reply etc.). Otherwise, you can imagine, every instance/server would need to have the full capacity of the entire federated network, which would be very inefficient, and impossible for smaller instances. As you have discovered you are still free to request information from a specific instance directly. Most even allow you to view their local timelines. Unfortunately there are very few clients that would make it easy for you. I only know of two that do, Subway Tooter and Fedilab, both exclusive to Android. Subway Tooter is especially good at this, as it gives you a lot of options on how to view a given toot or timeline.
I'm not an expert on the specifics to be honest, but I imagine the search on your instance would only bring results that your instance already pulled in. It will not cause new things to be pulled in like the usual interactions do. Basically it's not a full federation wide search, it's just within what your instance already knows about. There might be an exception there for user search specifically, since it's not that much data, but either way it would not be an exhaustive search across the entire network, as I understand.
@namark @downey @thegreatmonarch Thanks for your usefull reply!
I just don't get something. When I search for a user, the data is stored on the drive? Why? I thought it was just remotly sent to the instace you're using. So if I search for a user once, all the messages are downloaded on the instace?