I heard that the All feed aggregates content from all communities that instance members have subscribed to, meaning if I subscribe to a new community, it’ll start showing up in everyone else’s All feed.
Let’s suppose I have an account on an instance with a particular thematic focus. Should I avoid subscribing to communities outside of that theme, in order to preserve the purity of their All feed?
So that one subscription is effectively how ‘my’ instance becomes aware any specific community off-instance, in order to check for posts there?
That both makes sense and is rather counterintuitive at the same time.
I think it becomes pretty intuitive if you can hold in your mind the model of each instance as a totally separate, independent website with no inherent ties to any other.
The problem is, everything here kind of vaguely looks like a place we’re used to being a single website, and each instance looks more or less like each other, so that sense of independence and difference is lost. But if you think of it like, I don’t know, Facebook or something like that having the possibility of communicating with mydumbwebsite.com, it becomes a lot clearer that that communication needs to be initiated somehow.
It is indeed. Main consequence of this is that if you join a new or small instance, you will see less of the fediverse without actively seeking it