As an admin of my personal instance, sometimes I can't help but wish my "Federated" feed was more lively.
Then I go to any bigger instance and wish it was actually readable...there's got to be some sort of middle ground, somehow. I haven't figured it out yet though.
Under normal circumstances, federation on Mastodon requires follow relationships. However, I *cannot* follow every single account on Fedi, obviously. Furthermore, the tools that I have found to alleviate the problem, either don't work as well as they seem, or are "all or nothing" firehoses that pull *everything*.
Hopefully one day I'll figure something out.