Like many others, I created accounts on a few different instances to try things out. Using apps like Liftoff and Jerboa make it very convenient to switch between accounts, but I’ve noticed that I get different posts showing up when browsing All, even with the same sort settings.
Can someone explain why that would be? I don’t think any of the instances I’m on are defederated, so shouldn’t I see the same posts across different instances?
The All timeline shows posts from communities that have at least one user from that instance subscribed to them.
If no users from instance A are subscribed to community X, this community will never show up in that instance’s All timeline.
This is because otherwise instances have no idea what communities are out there. It isn’t until a user subscribes to a remote community that the instance starts receiving posts for that community and learns that it exists.
When a user subscribes to a remote commmunity, the remote instance starts sending updates for content that’s newly created for that community and the user’s instance knows it exists and is able to display that received content in the ALL timeline.
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Mastodon has something called relays which are servers that share all posts from one instance to another. It’ll eventually come to Lemmy as well.
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It’s not a problem. It’s by design. But yes, more users and more subs will mean more stuff gets interconnected.
But the idea is that this way, each instance only needs to store the content that at least one user on it interested in.
If no-one on a server wants a certain community on another, the instance never even bothers with it.
It also means that if you’re, let’s say, on an instance that’s very specifically focused on realistic ecological changes, such as, I don’t know, slrpnk.net, you’re going to be more likely to stumble into a community you might be interested in on the
allfeed since everyone on your instance is also interested in realistic sustainability.