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?
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’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.