I think something like that it is what happened. I found this image that has been posted in the fediverse trying to explain how things are visible.
In a similar situation, I'm currently using Mastodon (mastodon.social) and Firefish (calckey.social) following the same hashtags. As calckey.social is a smaller instance, there are many post not showing in Firefish. I tested this by checking the profile of a user who is in a completely different instance. Mastodon.social was capable of showing the most recent post of that user but calckey.social was still not aware of that post, as it might be the case that nobody from my Firefish instance has interacted with such post nor looked for it directly.
If such setting is implemented, please don't limit it to a single language. Many people knows multiple ones while still wanting to filter out all the other languages they are not familiar with.