this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests

Is that essential, though? As long as everybody is federated, it shouldn't matter, except maybe it will take longer to see some posts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As long as everybody are federated - but they are not. The bigger instances tend to be federated with everyone, but the smaller/more specialized ones might not yet have federated with each other. Of course you can still follow people from anywhere (as long as they're not actively _de_federated), but searching for hashtags might unfortunately be less powerful for discovery from a smaller server. If you're on a smaller instance not specific to your interests, you might do particularly well to start out finding accounts to follow through some third party list.

The greatest advantage of being on a specialized instance is, however, in the feeds: The "local" timeline shows you anything posted by anyone on your instance, while the "federated" timeline shows you anything posted by accounts someone on your server follows. On a large, general server both these feeds will be extremely crowded with all kinds of content. On a specialized instance, it's likely that both timelines will be somewhat interesting, and people might be reading it and discover your posts there as well. :)