Recently, I’ve set up my own Mastodon server and immediately run into the infamous issue of not being able to see my posts from other instances. As it turned out, posts from other servers are cached to be displayed, but caching only happens after somebody starts to follow the profile in question. Because my instance is small, this basically means nobody will see my posts, which ruins the whole point of running my own server.
Is this a Mastodon only issue or is it just the way Fediverse works? Are there any alternatives to Mastodon that allow seeing the entire timeline without following? Does Lemmy share the same issue?
It is a limitation, but I wouldn’t call necessarily an issue, though it is something that happens in any instances.
Not necessarily an issue because you can pull yet unfederated posts by searching for their links or by user interactions. And if everything got pulled at once, with how ActivityPub works, all instances involved would have potential days of downtime, as well as requiring terabytes of storage on the get-go.
And as a means to pull older posts, some softwares have hardcoded search links, like Lemmy itself (iirc), Mbin (the one I use), Mastodon, etc., meaning you can use some redirect script to send posts to your instance’s search page. Also, if you’re on an instance that allows following people (e.g. a Mastodon one), if the person you follow comments or boosts a previously unfederated post or comment, it should get imported into your instance.
And if you use userscripts through e.g. Violentmonkey, here's one for redirecting posts to your instance
https://web.archive.org/web/20260308222546/https://pastebin.com/BF2s9aXr
The userscript is sent through Pastebin because they allow guest posts, and through Internet Archive because I set my documents to expire.
And the script is originally made by an LLM but that I have manually checked for oddities, that the logic is simple enough that chances of the AI hallucinating were already pretty small when generated, that I have been manually expanding since, and that covers most patterns and instances I’ve come across.
Only change you’d need to do is replacing the The/Brain/Bin search links (
https://thebrainbin.org/search?search[q]=) for the pertinent ones for the posts you encounter, e.g. for Mastodon Socialhttps://mastodon.social/search?q=, and for the Lemmy instance Ani.Socialhttps://ani.social/search?q=.Thanks a lot for the script! I just thought of pulling posts automatically using some kind of script a few days ago and there you are telling me about that very thing lol