I don't think I'm 'grokking' how the fediverse works. (Or at least, how following federated accounts works)
I'm taking some time to set up a mastodon account, and am currently confused about how following other federated accounts is supposed to work.
Let's use https://lemmy.world/c/comicstrips as an example. I go to that link and I see posts from other federated sites, as well as posts made directly on lemmy.world (I presume). I can also view all posts from that community in r.nf as well (https://r.nf/c/comicstrips@lemmy.world). I see all the same posts from the lemmy link.
What I don't understand is why, when I follow @comicstrips@lemmy.world on mastodon I only ever am shown replies and boosts from the account. I don't see the original image post, which I was expecting.
What am I missing? For what it's worth I'm using Phanpy to interact with mastodon, but am experiencing the same behavior on mastodon.social as well.
Lemmy and Mastodon both use activity pub in the back end, but are very different platforms. The former is basically a stand-in reddit replacement and the latter a twitter one. Following a lemmy community on mastodon won't work as nicely as you might expect, as the platforms don't use exactly the same pieces of information in exactly the same ways - since functionality is different some pieces of information get lost or ignored.
@scrambo
To add on to this, I would suggest trying mbin, like at fedia.io. Open up the magazines and search for "comic" and for me the first result is comicstrips@lemmy.world. If you open it you should see the posts, thumbnails, contents, and even a list of all the duplicate posts across the fediverse.
I find that kbin and mbin do a better job of feathering the different fediverse content together. But yeah, activity pub is pulling together different kinds of content, and the individual softwares are giving an opinionated view of them.