Hi all,
I’m still a fediverse baby and I am testing various fediverse platforms and accounts. Recently I tried to search my own pixelfed.social account from gram.social and was surprises that I see 2 photos from 7 on my profile. I see not likes count.
Why such inconsistencies? If pixelfed and gram shall communicate with protocol, why not everything is visible? That can give a user a false information because such searched account looks unused/abandoned.
Fediverse works like newsletters via email. If you search for an account on a different server, only the last few items are (sometimes) pulled and shown on your local instance. Only after subscribing/following that other account, you’ll get new(!) updates sent to your local server. For older messages, you’ll have to visit the other account’s server.
Maybe those 2 photos you see were shared with gram.social earlier.
If it was shared/reposted, how would I know?
Any new shares/reposts would show once the account was followed from the gram.social server. Anything prior to that you would have to view the account on the home instance.
All my followers are from Pixelfed, thanks for your explanations. Still seems unclear how this works, especially if you see no notification/reshare/like/follow.
Posts can also get synced if someone from gram.social searched for a direct link to a post. E.g. if you go to gram.social and search for
https://pixelfed.social/p/pixuser/1234, it’ll get synced in the background and show up if you follow@pixuserlater on. (Depending on how long the instance caches it.)Likes and Reshares of external posts are local to their instance. Those won’t get sent to other instances. E.g. on my private GotoSocial I don’t see the correct amount of likes or reshares of posts from other instances. I’ll have to visit the posts on their original instance for that. (But then, I rarely care.)