mooshWhat’s the difference between Local and All?
The local feed shows posts from the communities that were created by a user on your instance, and where the canonical version of that community is hosted on the instance where your account is.
The all feed shows posts from the above, and also from communities that were created by a user on a different instance and where the canonical version of that community is on their instance. They're shown in your all feed when one or more users on your instance subscribe to them and posts start getting federated from the remote instance to yours for browsing purposes.
On a big general instance like lemmy.world where your account is, the local feed doesn't feel all that meaningfully different from the all feed. If you had an account on pathfinder.social (an instance that only hosts tabletop roleplaying communities) the local feed would have a very particular flavor. But on lemmy.world, the local feed has bits of everything just like the all feed.
I've subscribed to a bunch of communities and I rarely use anything but the subscribed feed. Very occasionally I'll quick browse through all, pretty much never to I interact with local.
If your local instance has a particular focus it can be handy to check Local once in a while. I’m on lemmy.ca, which has a Canadian focus. I use Subscribed most of the time, but when I want to catch up on Canadian things I switch to Local. This would be less meaningful on a more general-purpose instance.
Somewhat lost and found Redditor here. I think I got a grip on this. Local is all communities in the current instance you are browsing on.
All is going to show posts from all participating federated instances and their communities.
AndyYou will sign up to an instance. On this instance there will be local communities. Kinda like going to your local shopping mall. But you don’t need to be limited to that. You can select ‘all’ and it’s like all the local communities (from all of the federated instances) are visible to see.
Lemmy is decentralized, you can think of it as being organized more like e-mail than Reddit is: people may have their account on different instances (for emails it’s gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc), and yet they can communicate with each other.
Lemmy communities, just like people, also each belong to a given instance; and yet can also be used by people of any instance.
With that: “local” will tell you what’s going on on the instance where your account is specifically, “all” will tell you what’s going on across all instances.
Someone on your instance needs to be following for it to get pulled into "all" on your instance. On a large instance that might be rather "all" encompassing, but it's an important distinction. On a fresh single-user instance "all" will contain zero posts.
AwwabLocal should be only communities on your local server while all is everything on that server and other server it knows about.