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1. Embed this notice
   Saorsa (saorsa@neondystopia.world)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 05:59:22 JST Saorsa
   Can any instance operators offer an explanation as to why federating with Mastodon from an instance not running their software tends to be more difficult?
   
   I've noticed lately that when viewing a profile from a Mastodon instance, their post history tends to be incomplete or otherwise missing. Any posts that are made recently tend to have a significant delay or don't show up on their profile at all.
   
   I know that you can view the content from the remote instance in question for a complete profile, that you need to do so however does seem to be a failing on the part of the server software to properly federate and populate posts.
   
   #SelfHosting, #FediAdmin, #Mastodon, #MastoAdmin, #ServerAdmin, #SocialMedia, #AskFedi, #FediMeta, #Fedi, #Federation, #Fediverse.
   • Embed this notice
     djsumdog (djsumdog@djsumdog.com)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 05:59:19 JST djsumdog

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko
     • crow
     The post has to federate to your sever. Someone on your instance has to be following them. Otherwise you only see posts that have federated to you (usually because someone else one of your users follows reacted to or boosted that post)
   • Embed this notice
     Saorsa (saorsa@neondystopia.world)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 05:59:20 JST Saorsa

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko
     • crow
     The issue is a lot more pronounced for Mastodon users than say Pleroma & forks and Soapbox.
     
     You won't catch every post ever made, but for the most part it is much more complete than with Mastodon. That seems to narrow it down a fair bit from being an ActivityPub issue to more likely being an issue with the #Mastodon stack itself.
     
     CC: @Gargron@mastodon.social
     
     @crow@irlqt.net
   • Embed this notice
     crow@irlqt.net's status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 05:59:21 JST crow

     in reply to

     @Saorsa@neondystopia.world I also want to know why this is or if I have something misconfigured

   • Embed this notice
     Saorsa (saorsa@neondystopia.world)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 06:05:51 JST Saorsa

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • jeff (sane)
     • crow
     Sociologically most are already aware of that. I was more interested in the technical reason behind why posts weren't populating profiles viewed locally from an instance.
     
     @jeff@mk.magicka.org @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @crow@irlqt.net
   • Embed this notice
     jeff (sane) (jeff@mk.magicka.org)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 06:05:51 JST jeff (sane)

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • crow

     @Saorsa@neondystopia.world @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @crow@irlqt.net there is no technical limitation inherent to mastodon, it's purely the choices made by server opers.

     djsumdog likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     jeff (sane) (jeff@mk.magicka.org)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 06:05:52 JST jeff (sane)

     in reply to

     • Eugen Rochko
     • djsumdog
     • crow

     @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @crow@irlqt.net @Gargron@mastodon.social @Saorsa@neondystopia.world activitypub is stored in the balls tbh

   • Embed this notice
     jeff (sane) (jeff@mk.magicka.org)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 06:05:52 JST jeff (sane)

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • crow

     @djsumdog@djsumdog.com @crow@irlqt.net @Saorsa@neondystopia.world the real reason is mastodon segments themselves off from the rest of the network because of the purity testing death spiral servers constantly break federation so you tend to have a far more fragmented filtered view from mastodon vs other slices of fedi

   • Embed this notice
     djsumdog (djsumdog@djsumdog.com)'s status on Monday, 02-Feb-2026 06:06:30 JST djsumdog

     in reply to

     • jeff (sane)
     • crow
     It's a combination of the two most likely. I have a chart and some code for determining where breaks occur in the fediverse:
     
     https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-broken-fediverse/