What determines what appears in the "federated" feed on Mastodon?
Is it all the posts by off-site accounts followed by anyone on site?
@WomanCorn toots from servers that we federate with, ie servers on which reside users our users follow.
i imagine you may be asking due to some of the content that's been showing up lately
something I can do is "silence" certain servers with a low signal-to-noise ratio, such that only posts from followed users show up, rather than all of that server's content
@locus I am mostly curious how it works. I expect, like Twitter, to follow entertaining people and mostly ignore the federated page once my personal feed is full of goodies.
So, by default if anyone on this server follows anyone on that server, it adds that whole server's output to our federated page? That seems like a lot, but maybe Mastodon servers are smaller than I expected.
@WomanCorn that's pretty much it, yeah, with the caveat that there are some technical details idk about how exactly the fetch happens. I imagine it may effectively sample the feed rather than mirroring every single post, but I'm not sure
most servers are pretty small, numbering in the low hundreds of users, and Pleroma instances tend to be even smaller
@locus I would have guessed that the federated feed would be dominated by mastodon.social or another large instance, but it isn't, so I wondered if it was curated.
Something else is going on there. Sampling seems possible, or IDK. I will have to research.