I am once again astounded by how unreasonably effective FEP 1b12 is at federating content completely.
On NodeBB I have a list of “popular” topics, which is mainly populated based on number of posts within a given time period. For most content from Mastodon-based servers, this supplies a decent signal of a given topic’s popularity. The more people you follow, the more effective it is, but overall it’s pretty shit at getting you the whole conversation.
Enter 1b12, Lemmy’s preferred federation method. Follow a community actor and you start receiving everything that happens in that community. Replies, likes, the whole lot.
It also absolutely dominates my popular feed. It’s all Lemmy stuff now because the Mastodon stuff literally can’t compare.
Albeit the SNR is a tad lower, so give and take…
A lot of the effort I’m championing with the ForumWG deals with combating the inability for Mastodon (and other non-1b12 implementors) to federate content thoroughly. A lot of that is due to design decisions that were thoughtfully made, so this isn’t a critique, per se.
It really does highlight that 1b12 is actually quite good at what it does (federating content out), and that 7888, et al., would be a great complement for post-hoc backfill.