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Comment by thomnottom | Hacker News Reader

Portability was such a huge factor for me losing interest in diaspora, and I hope that can be addressed.

As for the multiple instances, can't you just pick one and follow things on the others? That was my understanding.

Currently my process for discovering what to follow is to look at the federated feed, looking at the local feed, and looking at hashtags - the parts of other instances I see on these views is limited to the parts of those instances being followed by at least one person on my instance, so if I'm on a small instance it's very unlikely that between the few dozen people in my instance that all of another small instance is covered - I'd like to just say, "merge bookwitty.social and mastodon.technology in my feed" or "search for #scifi on bookwitty.social and mastodon.technology".

Ideally, I'd like a seamless experience that allows me to see a "virtual instance" that is the merger of two instances. Like I said - I think the part that I see can be handled client side. Getting other people to see me, and having a portable identity, is another question entirely.

I think the approach to that is create individual accounts across instances, but always use your "main" or "home" instance. Follow people you find in the other instances from "main" account and always reply/boost from the "main" account. Eventually other people might pick up to follow your "main" account?

It's a lot of social behavior that yes might be better if the technology did more of the grunt work for you.

You can follow individual accounts on other instances and their posts will show up in your home and federated timeline, but there's no way to, say, "follow" the full local or federated timeline of other instances. I assume that's what OP was referring to.

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