What exactly does "Local" filtering do for Lemmy?

TheTeaMonster@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 12 points –

Does it show posts from locations near you? That doesn't make sense. So what is it supposed to signify?

EDIT: Wow, thanks for the lightning-fast responses, guys. I'm loving this place <3

20

Shadow priests melt faces.

I mean

It'll only show posts from you home instance. In your case Lemmy.world

Seems like it should definitely not be the default sorting mechanism. It's a fringe use case at best. Most people subscribe to communities across the 'verse and their default should be "subscribed" and have 5> communities and "all" if not logged in or have fewer than 5 community subscriptions.

You can change your default sorting in the settings :)

Ah yes, I know. I just meant the default setting for new users.

Instead of "Active" and "Local", it should be "Hot" and "Subscribed" (or "All"). I think anyone who spends enough time to get used to it here quickly realizes they should change their profile settings.

What is its purpose? Is it a feature or bloat?

It's a feature of federation. Each instance can have it's own communities, even with the same name. So there could be hundreds of "no stupid questions" communities out there.

Picking 'local' let's you see the feed of your instance. Picking 'all' shows you the feed from all.

Local is the server you signed into. Just communities on that.

"Local filtering" makes it sound like that's removed, lol. I think the button could definitely be renamed "Show only this instance" or something.

I've been thinking about this off & on, and I keep coming back to the silly idea of renaming it, "Here". It wouldn't really clarify much, but the questions would be funnier:

"What is "Here" filtering?"
"It's showing you here"
"where?"
"here, where you are"
"but where am I?"
"you're there!"
"so what's here?!"

Local means it only shows posts that originate from the instance your account is created on. In your case it would be lemmy.world.

It will only show posts from your home instance (in your case lemmy.world) as opposed to posts from all the various instances that make up Lemmy.

I wanna add to this that "all" isn't really from all Lemmy instances, but instead only from communities your instance knows about.
I'm not sure if anyone on your instance has to be subbed to that community or if it's enough if that instance was searched for once on your instance.

I think it just has to have been searched for, but yeah I probably should've said "all connected instances."

I believe it is for posts specific to communities on your instance (server), which in your case is lemmy.world.

It shows you posts from communities that exist on the same instance as your account.

It shows you communities from within your own instance.

Local doesn't mean "geographically local", it means "within your own instance" local.

It means only the sexy hot singles 5mi from you can post. Click here to meet up with sexy girls who wanna bang! (sexy girls who want to bang are not near you)