Hmm. Let's say you run your own solo #mastodon #instance. Your #federated #feed will be limited to the instances of people you #follow.
But what if you made a dummy unused account on your instance that simply followed a person from every notable instance?
As I understand it, that should greatly broaden the net for your federated feed.
@ssfckdt Please don't do that. We don't want spiders, bots, aggregators, etc in the fediverse. Let's keep it human-to-human. Thanks!
@david_megginson oh, I wasn't taking about a bot, just an idle account. You'd set its follows manually.
Sounds like it wouldn't work anyway.
that is how it works and how it will always work
what's different is that you, and your community control the software on your end
@jeffcliff @david_megginson i simply thought that federated feed included public content from whole instances that someone on an instance follows, i didn't realize it was only accounts that are followed (or boosted/etc)
@ssfckdt not precisely. You’d get the likes, boosts, and posts by the people that dummy account followed. To get the whole federated feed you’d need to use a relay.
I use a combo of relays with local small instances, and a couple larger ones.
To pick up maximum coverage of key hashtags I follow, I use Fake Firehose to bring them in through a dummy relay.