All timeline is all post from subs/community that you and your instance-mates subscribe. Each instance has different users, and different user follow different communities. Hence All timeline can be different for each instances.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Things are starting to click (for me) about how all of this works, and it reminds me of what I missed about lurking around the internet... but it's cooler lol. It's what I've kinda been looking for, but didn't know where to find. I'm pretty stoked
If a user follows something from Mastodon (for example) will that also begin to show up for the rest of their instance's All timeline?
AFAIK, no. Lemmy only shows posts from group actor a.ka community. And only shows comment from normal user as child of posts.
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.
So exponential growth should fix the problem?
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.
it’ll be a blast watching new features and interconnectivity expand. I’m here for it
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 all feed since everyone on your instance is also interested in realistic sustainability.
This is really the biggest reason that instances with more specific focus make more sense than every instance being a huge generalist melting pot. It's important for those generalist instances to exist, too, but the smaller special-interest instances serve an important purpose.
I view the general purpose instances as either a starting point or as a home base. Even then, the general purpose instances all have their distinct flavors. Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, beehaw.org, and sh.itjust.works DO NOT appeal all to the same people, but they still represent for many the same totem within the fediverse. These are the general purpose home base instances that people sign up for at first, start exploring, discovering communities, and perhaps learning that one thing or another about their home base's moderation style isn't quite right for them. Maybe sh.itjust.works takes too long to decide to do something, perhaps beehaw.org defederates from an instance with good communities because that instance has too many users on it to moderate the people that even that other instance owner wishes weren't on them, potentially lemm.ee is too open in its federation policy for you. You learn these things as you explore. Along the way, too, you'll discover that maybe the lemmy.dbzer0.com crowd or the slrpnk.net crowd consistently are saying things you find insightful, interesting, or that you agree with, so you go check out their instance and discover "hey! This is a fascinating set of specific communities and ideals. It might be this is where my second home should be" and suddenly, your Fediverse experience has become much more tailored to you.
All of this is fantastic! And it's only possible because the fediverse is not a collection of pooled compute resources acting as a cluster, it's because it's a loosely associated grouping of self-governing online gathering places.
Oh, and, of course, there's the ultimate ideal instance for everyone, possumpat.io. The instance for people who like possums. Which is everyone, obviously. There is no need for any other instance. The entire purpose of creating the packet-switching technologies of the 1960s that the entire internet is built on top of was to enable the creation of possumpat.io. The entire point of the death of reddit was to get people off reddit and onto possumpat.io. We have entered the post-game fuckabouts part of the sandbox simulation that is the video game we all inhabit
The real beauty of the fediverse is that, despite having not been blessed to be on possumpat.io directly, both you and I can subscribe to https://possumpat.io/c/possums anyway, and enjoy possums from the slums of our home instances.
Who doesn’t enjoy possums
Monsters, that's who. Uncultured monsters.
Not every instance communicates with every other instance in existance. Some instances 'know about' other instances while other instances do not. One instance has to interact with another directly first for them to discover eachother. This is a problem for smaller instances that don't have as much cross interaction going on. Also some instances are blocked such as nsfw depending on the admins set rules for aggregation.
I'm not too knowledgeable on this but I imagine the servers update content or ingest content from other servers at different rates. Some larger instances are under heavy load and some instances may be running older/newer versions of Lemmy.
Do admins have any say in how content is ordered in the feed? I don't know at all.
Imagine 5 instances, all federated with each other. That means each instance maintains one connection to each of the other 4 instances, and there are 25 connections in total.
One of those instances is bigger than all of the other four combined, and it's struggling to keep up. In one 5-minute window, there are 300 messages to send to each of the other servers, or 1200 messages. These messages are all of new posts, new subscriptions, new commenta, new up/down votes, new edits, new deletes, and new mod actions. The server only has resources to send maybe 800 or 1000 messages to the other four instances, so the last 200 get queued.
And then the next 5-minute window opens with 1200 MORE messages. Except we still have the 200 messages from that last window to clear. Evertthng else being equal, at the end of THIS window we might have 400 messages queued. So on and so forth, more messages get queued and the goal posts recede faster than the speed of light. Eventually the server runs of of queue, and messages (at best) get dropped. Ultimately tjenserver crashes and restarts and those messages in the queue get lost. (There's an announcement on the main page)
Lemmy.world.is that big server, and its subscriber instances are getting inconsistent updates because Lemmy.world's server is resource starved from the massive influx of new users and traffic this weekend.
Have patience. It'll smooth out, but it will take time.
I read an instance will only mirror content after an user requests it, so different people may have different requests.
for example if I want to follow a community about gardening on lemmy world, and nobody else from my instance is following content from lemmy world, then my instance doesn't show lemmy world- until I subscribe to a community. Once I do, my instance will start receiving lemmy world content, and everyone else from my instance will be able to see lemmy world (even if they dont follow anything there) if they browse All.
I'm not certain, but part of it would depend on what instances you're talking about. For example, Beehaw defederated from .world and shit just works, so /all is going to look a lot different from those three.
part the difference is that instances only get posts for remote communities where they have at least one local subscriber
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