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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Local timelines are at best an attempt to help with content discovery and really too overrated. If the instance is too big, it feels like reading from the firehose and if the instance is too small it is better to just browse the directory and find the profiles that seem interesting to you.

To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.

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"To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership"

Wow yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It's too bad nodes became associated with niche hobbies or interests.

E.g. a fraternity/sorority that hosts a node would make perfect sense for a local timeline. I guess the only issue is that these organizations aren't permanent. So people would have to migrate, which isn't a thing for twitter or facebook. I know mastodon has a feature for this specifically but I think people would still find it too confusing if people's handles kept on changing.

But even then, you can only pick one server per account, which seems asinine in this day and age. I should be able to browse any topic with one identity.

> I should be able to browse any topic with one identity.

You can. Who said otherwise? Where did you get that idea?

An account at Mastodon (or Pleroma/Misskey/Pixelfed/anything) lets you follow anyone you want. There is no restriction about server talking with each other at the protocol level. If the server is federating and its admin is not trigger-happy with federation, you are good to go.

I think you're mistaken. I have permissions to access posts from any server (apart from those that the administrator has blocked, anyway), but that doesn't mean I can view another server's local feed in the Mastodon UI, which is the question at hand.

Not every mastodon instance lets you browse their local feed if you're not registered to that instance. Now, it would be interesting if one could subscribe to multiple "local" feeds...

> people would still find it too if people's handles kept on changing.

Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x.

The same with addresses from "email providers". They change less often, but it is still possible. My first account was probably at yahoo, but when gmail came up, I migrated, started to tell people my new address and auto forwarded any message that went to the old email.

"Well", that may be a lot of work to some people. To which the answer is "the only way to have absolute stability regarding your identity is if you own it". You can buy a domain a use a managed email service, you can have a domain and have a managed activitypub service provider.

I really don't get people's confusion over federation. It's just like email.

But with work/university email, you only use it for work/university. It's not a social network. It's not like you are sharing a pic of your cat, and want to keep the replies after you move to another job.

After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same

Yes. But what is your confusion about it? Where are you objecting to what I said?

yeah I replied in sibling thread, mostly topic based instances and federation is the problem. (when identity is bound to host)

When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.

I do agree that because mastodon became focused around specific niches per host, it made things much more complicated for new users. Do I join mastodon.social? Do I join bsd.network? Do I join writing.exchange? Etc.

What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me?

I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline.

So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.

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