TWKN tends to fill up with politics and controversy to a greater extent than it fills with other stuff, because that's what gets reactions. Because of how federation works, if anyone on your instance is following anyone that puts one reply into a giant hellthread about Lunduke or something, or reposts anything from that thread, the whole thread comes in.
So if you're a single-user instance, for example, and you are following one person on another server, and that person replies 'cute' to a picture of a tiger eating a hamburger, that thread will have two or three replies, and they'll get mirrored here. Giant, angry threads have dozens of people and hundreds of replies, so if the person you're following posts 'wow this is quite a hellthread' in one such thread, your server will pull in that entire thread. So your TWKN will fill up with a handful of posts from the tiger thread and 800 posts from the political argument.
As a result, things that aren't controversial are always dwarfed by things that are, in terms of post volume. I don't necessarily think it's a problem that needs solving or one that can be solved technologically without doing more harm than good, but if you are trying to have a comfortable time, it helps to know how that works so you've tempered your expectations somewhat. It's not always that everyone's arguing, just there are more posts that don't get mirrored to your instance than posts that do, and arguments are more likely to propagate through fedi.
This is worth reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
So if you're a single-user instance, for example, and you are following one person on another server, and that person replies 'cute' to a picture of a tiger eating a hamburger, that thread will have two or three replies, and they'll get mirrored here. Giant, angry threads have dozens of people and hundreds of replies, so if the person you're following posts 'wow this is quite a hellthread' in one such thread, your server will pull in that entire thread. So your TWKN will fill up with a handful of posts from the tiger thread and 800 posts from the political argument.
As a result, things that aren't controversial are always dwarfed by things that are, in terms of post volume. I don't necessarily think it's a problem that needs solving or one that can be solved technologically without doing more harm than good, but if you are trying to have a comfortable time, it helps to know how that works so you've tempered your expectations somewhat. It's not always that everyone's arguing, just there are more posts that don't get mirrored to your instance than posts that do, and arguments are more likely to propagate through fedi.
This is worth reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
@p What does "TWKN" mean? I searched the web but couldn't find anything useful.
@rah "The Whole Known Network". I forget what Mastodon calls it ("Global Timeline"?), but it's all the posts visible from your instance.
