how am i supposed to curate content on this site when idk what the fuck the local or "federated" timeline is about?

this is like twitter fucked reddit i don't

@alicewcastle I’ve no idea how I’m going to keep up with like 3 different instances
@alicewcastle I've had the different timelines/instances stuff explained to me a lot of times and it just refuses to stick in my brain

@alicewcastle the local timeline is the public posts of everyone on mastodon.social. Every other instance is a different, connected site using the same protocol, run by its own admin w/their own priorities, e.g it might be themed, or have a specific CoC.

The federated timeline is every public post from every instance that .social sees, usually b/c someone from .social follows the author. I.e, the combined home feeds of +100,000 users. A lot of the time it's so fast that it's mostly a curiosity.

@alicewcastle I think any answer to how to curate will be the same as w/any new medium–study, research, experiment. No-one knew how to curate on twitter for years, until they did. Mastodon might look like tweetdeck but it's not twitter; it has different assumed values, e.g it does what it can to avoid advertisers & artificial timeline manipulation, it comparatively deprioritises follower counts & encourages 'random' interactions by letting you see what your whole local community is doing.