Lists in mastodon were completely useless until we added the new features to QOTO for subscribing to remote instances local timelines and other subscriptions. There is a certain satisfaction in making a useless feature useful. It felt like wasted space before.

If you can't tell I'm super happy and excited about all the new features we added. So much fun getting to use them and knowing we are the only english speaking instance to have these features :)

@freemo Have you compared the domain subscription with mastovue.glitch.me or fedilab? Does it make sense to compare?

For me some toots I can see in those clients seem to be missing in "domain subscribed lists" at random. Can't see any pattern, but it seems to be a substantial part. I guess it's another obvious thing about the difference between how it's done on client side vs server side I'm misunderstanding...

@namark Id be curious to hear how fedilab implements it exactly. They would be useful to compare but I dont know enough about the fedilab internals to know how they compare.

@freemo I think they are just doing a simple API request like this:
fosstodon.org/api/v1/timelines

It seems to correspond to their output, and I can see the same discrepancy between that and my list on here.

@namark With the help of Rob I figured out whats going on..

So you have two options.

1) is like you already did, use domain subscription. This basically fiters from the federated feed and gives you a timeline.

2) you can go to the properties on a post or in a profile and pull up the remote timeline. This will pull it up as a separate column and its content will be filled via the API. You can of course pint he column.

@namark FYI I mispoke the link to the remote timeline is only int he properties off a post, not the profile itself. Which is odd ill fix that, but it gets you the effect you want.

@freemo Thanks for looking into it! Unfortunately for me both methods yield the same result. That column's content is identical to the domain subscribed list(for those that had enough time to fill up), and still missing some toots compared to a direct API call, or the other two clients I mentioned. It's hard to catch on smaller instances, but for mastodon.social or fosstodon.org I can always see 1-2 missing in first 5-10.

@namark hmm thats strange. When i tested it earlier the remote timeline seemed to populate instantly and retroactively like the timeline API would suggest where as subscriptions started empty and filled slowly if at all.

@freemo yes, the remote timeline column is instantaneous for me too, but still missing toots, and once the list catches up, they are identical. So could be using the same method under the hood... or could be something down the line that causes the problem for both methods...

@namark So I tested this locally and my findings dont agree with yours.

I have had a list goign locally for tech.lgbt through subscriptions since the features was added 2 days ago. This is a very slow server without many updates it seems because in those 2 days the list has yet to update for me, so we clearly arent getting much int he federation pipeline from them.

However if i pull up the remote timeline I do in fact get a ton of toots from them over the time period I have had my list going. So it would appear the remote timeline does in fact show more content than the domain subscription, even if you give it time to catch up.

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@freemo You're right, that's the case for me as well on some instances, so could be just a coincidence that I see identical results on others.

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