So do you only see people in the instance you’re in or can you cross instances?
Also, did I use instances right here? 😅
@RileyStock you did use instances correctly! You’ll catch on soon enough… It’s just like drinking from the firehose at first.
@RileyStock you can see people in other instances if they are not blocked by the moderators of the instance you are on… There is a list of instances that can’t be reached from here but I don’t have it on hand here on mobile…
@BeardedRogue ok cool! Thanks. Some things on here are pretty great and other things I don’t quite understand yet 😅
@RileyStock You have two timelines, the Local Timeline, which is just tabletop.social and the Federated Timeline which is all instances that aren't blacklisted
@redlila thanks! I forgot the mobile app doesn’t have it. So I searched for someone on mobile and couldn’t find them, so went and searched on desktop and it worked. Cool place, but has some kinks to work out.
@RileyStock no problem, what app are you using? That may be a limitation of the particular one you have. I recommend Toot! If you’re on iOS as it has all features available on the web client.
@RileyStock You see people in your local instance on the local timeline - so, the local timeline shows posts that tabletop.social users have made (and that we've made public). The federated timeline is posts from many instances (many people find that's way too many posts, and never look at it. It's huge!). Once you follow someone - from this instance or another one - their posts will show up in your home timeline.

@RileyStock You and I do not share an instance (server), and yet here I am, seeing your post!

The poorly named “Federated” feed shows you everyone (more or less) from everywhere (more or less) or you can set a favorite domain to follow and see just that. So right now I’m looking at tabletop.social posts only, even though my server is qoto.org.