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Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

Here's a quick question I have about Mastodon instances. Most instances I visit are hidden behind a sign up home page. Is this default? How does this encourage more people to interact? Or is that the point? Happy if anyone can just point me in the right direction

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On the about page of an instance[0], if you scroll down, there's "a look inside" of the federated timeline. If you know a username, you can go directly to their page[1]. You can find the username of the admin on the about/more page[2].

These are sample links to mastodon.social:

[0] https://mastodon.social/about

[1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron

[2] https://mastodon.social/about/more

sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it isn't the public timeline that's exposed.

This is something that was always a problem on Mastodon, but you can use other fediverse servers like https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all to look at the network, they show things publicly.

That's pretty much standard for any social network. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, they all just have a front page inviting you to join and/or log in. And a not-insignificant chance of flat-out refusing to show you a specific post someone linked to unless you're logged in.

If you scroll down, the default home page will show you a tiny snippet of the timeline - but it only shows the "federated" timeline, made of public toots from every other instance this one knows about, instead of the "local" one of public toots from this instance, which maybe kinda defeats the point of being a sample of what you'll get if you join this particular instance...

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