On mastodon you have three timelines/feeds: local, federated and global.
Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.
For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.
It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.
I would suggest to pick one of the larger instances – they are stable and have been for a while. For example, I'm on mstnd.social. You can also go with the official mastadon.social, probably the simplest. hachyderm.io is also a popular one, especially with programmers.
Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.
For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.
It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.
Relevant blogpost:
- https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2022-11-03_what-i-know-abou...