so apparently glitchsoc has a feature that lets you share a post only to your local instance, and prevent it from federating to the wider fediverse

whether a post is local-only or not is made available to clients via the not-in-vanilla-mastodon local_only: bool field in the Status struct returned by the api

on the surface, this is a neat idea, however the execution is... something.

as far as I can tell, if a post is to be local-only, the glitchsoc frontend silently appends the eye emoji (👁️) to the end of the post body, and the glitchsoc server interprets this as the signal that the post shouldn't federate

what this means in practice is that if you're on a glitchsoc instance and you explicitly make a post that ends with that emoji, the post won't federate, regardless of whether you toggled the local-only setting or not