So I know that there are some limitations for federation, especially if you are on a smaller instance. On Mastodon I stumble upon this problem on a daily basis. Here is an example. My account is on a smaller local instance (social.cologne) and in the following picture is a post of Eugen Rochko (which I follow):
As you can see there appears to be 0 likes and 0 boosts, below are 2 conmments (not pictured). As far as I understand this is a result of federation. My instance only tracks likes and boost of my instance (and people who are followed on my instance) and as a result his post seems to be not popular at all.
Too see every interaction I would have to visit the original post on Eugens instance (https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112574727273953783). Currently there are 6 boosts and 64 favorites on this post, with 4 replies below.
Last year I stumbled upon an android app that is able to show me the full interactions without visiting the source instance manually (https://github.com/tooot-app).
This is how I see Eugens post in my timeline
(Same as official app) and when i click on it to see the replies, the full content is shown.
I'm assuming that the app is loading the full content manually - just like if you would open the source instance.
Shouldn't this behaviour be the default - even in the main mastodon app? If I where to only use the official app I would miss most of the interactions and content (from people my instance doesnt know about). There are other examples where you would see replies to posts that allegedly don't exists. Only with Tooot I can see the rest of the conversation.
The tooot app didn't see any updates for some time... Are there any other apps that show full interactions right away as well?
That is a nice UI but still has the same problems as the official app. It doesn't show all the interactions.
Ah, I thought it maybe does since when I use that with my Akkoma instance I (mostly) don't have that problem. You can pretty easily migrate you account from Mastodon to Akkoma, so maybe that is an option? I hear that such issues are mostly exclusive to Mastodon.
If you don't have that problem, it is either because your instance is well connected and/or using some relay.
Could you expand on the relay thing? How does one know if a server uses a relay?
If you are the admin of the instance, you can it set up.
What about the user side? If I want to pick an instance that uses a relay, is there a way to know?
There is no way to know without access to the admin dashboard. You can get an idea of how active an instance is by checking the federated timeline stream, though.