I made a flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!
So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.
@RunningInCircles Thank you for the feedback! :) I feel like a bit of a simple and visual introduction is probably helpful, and it's no big deal if people work out the more finicky details later on.