The Official Applications are great if you're on a huge instance, but it only prominently features your Home feed, the one you directly curate.

The Local feed is just the community on your instance, and can be a lovely thing to interact with! In the Official applications, this is hididen under the Search icon, with the tab Community.

Meanwhile, the Federated feed is a combination of ALL the public Local feeds from every instance yours is connected with! It's a firehose, but a wonderful way to discover new people! The Official applications do not surface the Federated feed at all.

Especially if you're newer to the Fediverse, or on a smaller instance, I strongly recommend checking out some of the third party applications, such as MetaText or Toot! for iOS, or Tusky for Android, or tooot for either, to be able to experience all this platform has to offer!

#fediTips