@trinsec @2ck also for an account's posts to show up in an instance's timelines, someone from the instance must follow it, that's why some of them have bots that go around following random people. It's not a bug it's rate limiting.

@namark @trinsec ah. that's not how I thought it works. I thought different instances just had to set up some kind of agreement to pull posts from each other and they'd get all of the posts for all the accounts on the other instance.

The limitation you describe seems non-essential to me. certainly, prioritize direct subscriptions, but that doesn't mean that other public posts shouldn't be retrieved also. you can limit the rate of those posts by actually limiting the rate: set a "max posts per unit of time" param for the federation agreement to that instance and, after direct subs are exhausted retrieve others up to the rate limit.

@2ck doesn't make sense to me either, I was sarcastic paraphrasing "it's not a bug it's a feature". Then again I'm a measly frontend dev, what do I know about the high art of the backend.

@trinsec

@namark I looked it up. Not exactly the same idea, but I found out about "relays". I guess you can make a relay for your instance? Not sure how it works actually..

@2ck Yeah, no idea why would you need an extra separate server just to exchange posts between instances, I guess it's some sort of an optimization, but from the user's perspective sounds like an even bigger mess. Federation was not perfect before, but on the upside you could see which of us freaks caused that random junk to appear on your timeline by checking the follows. Now you'll still get random junk, it will still not be all the junk still making you feel that you are not getting the good stuff, and you will have no idea where it all came from, unless you can track yet another piece of metadata, that is which relays does any given instance use.