INTRO TO FEDERATION:

1. "mastodon" is a piece of software that runs on a server. There's a lot of servers that run it & u can follow ppl on other servers.

2. When u follow someone from another server, your server receives their toots.

3. The federated TL is all public toots that the server receives, ie all of the toots from everyone that ppl on your server follow.

4. ERGO: if u want to see more toots in the fed TL, follow + get other ppl on your server to follow ppl from other servers!

@chr I see. Why "+ get other ppl to follow"? Does the chance of seeing toots from other server Y increase if more from my server X follow users there?

@rateldajer if person B on my server is following person x@X and person y@Y, x and y's public toots will be part of my server's federated TL even if I'm not following them or ppl on their server.

Also, mastodon will sometimes bring in additional toots from people other than x & y from servers X and Y, in order to load boosts or replies for people who are following x & y

@chr is that second one true? I haven't seen that behavior for replies. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/905 seems to imply otherwise

@nightpool I believe the intended behavior is for replies to be loaded, it may be broken and/or have an unfinished implementation.

salt grain: i haven't looked through the whole codebase or talked to any contributors about this, going off of hearsay and circumstantial evidence from server setup.

@chr ah, thanks, that's good to hear. Hoping to have time to dig into the codebase soon, but until then I can only go by what I see :(