It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool
This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.
In the mean time, one way to fight this is to subscribe to lots of communities! Especially putting in the effort on young instances to be the pioneering subscriber that initiates federation between two previously non-interacting communities/instances.
It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool
This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.
In the mean time, one way to fight this is to subscribe to lots of communities! Especially putting in the effort on young instances to be the pioneering subscriber that initiates federation between two previously non-interacting communities/instances.