Won't that defeat the purpose of going on smaller instances to reduce the load on the servers though? I think I'd also have to make an account on that other instance if I wanted to make any comments/replies there.
Yeah, the only way is to check the home instance (or a peer instance which has been around long enough). This kind of sucks, but there is a reason for this. We need to keep it affordable for people to start new instances. It would be impossible to start a new Mastodon instance if the baseline requirement was to download and host everything which has ever been posted to mastodon.social. The problem would only get worse as the network grows older, and this would place a burden both on the established instances and the upstarts. I run a Mastodon instance with 65 active users which is only 7 months old and it already uses 600GB of storage. Lemmy works a little bit differently, but follows similar design decisions.
After a few weeks of history build up, it doesn't make nearly as much of a difference than it does on day one. Hopefully in the future, more sophisticated search tools can be developed which bypass these limitations, but that is the situation today.
Thanks for your answer. It's making sense to me. I do think this kind of thing might encourage more users to congregate on the large instances, but who knows, maybe it wouldn't be that bad if we continue making a new large instance if one fills up. Like how we have lemmy.ml, and now filling lemmy.world, and lemmy.world has a good experience.
I also am not entirely sure too how exactly the posts get populated, because I'm visiting some communities I added on that smaller server only a day ago, but it does show some posts from 7- 9 days ago (they don't have any new comments or anything), so yeah maybe I also don't completely understand how it works still. I added this one to the server I'm on - lemmy.studio - and I think I only added it today, but it's showing some from a few days ago: https://lemmy.studio/c/kbinMeta@kbin.social/data_type/Post/sort/Active/page/1
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