tom (available elsewhere)techbros: the beauty of FOSS is that people have complete control over everything! it's real freedom!
also techbros: hey if you block my followbot you don't know anything about federation and you're ruining everything for everyone actually
if you're engaging with people, federation comes naturally. that's more than enough.
Eric Blade@tom and since messages with mentions don't appear in timelines, you can only really engage with people when they aren't mentioning someone. at least, that's how it's working on my local instance.
@me messages and private posts federate to everyone @/mentioned in them.
People also often boost people across instances which is another way to populate your federated tl.
@tom ok, that hasn't been happening the last 2 days, very frequently. However, without at-mentions showing up in Timelines, or showing up sporadically, a node can look really empty, even with a lot of people communicating on it.
Ex: The message you sent me appears on my node, only in my Home and Notifications. No one else on my instance can see it, unless they specifically search you -- and then they only see that one message, it's like you didn't exist prior to that msg.