@kevinriggle i would be hard money there are strong preferential attachment effects and the kind of amplification you would expect on AP fedi too. one weird one tho that i think is counterintuitive is that there is like an inverted U shape to preferential attachment-like effects based on instance size. on very small instances, there are only a few people so not much amplification possible, but at like ~dozens to ~hundreds where the local feed is actually usable there are definitely strong amplification effects, especially on glitch instances that show boosts in the local tl, as ours does, but in a way that i think totally rocks. i see what the people around me are talking about every day. it needs some tuning to hide people like me who post too much, but still it's there. but then on the biggest instances where there's basically no instance effect, it inverts and becomes negative where a lot of instances have blocked them in part because of their sheer size. being on a big instance helps with network visibility outwards (for now...) but not "inwards."

So i want to figure out a way to sample from the fedi respectfully and responsibly because i think there would be some super interesting dynamics in the network that i want to try and approximate probabilistically without scraping the whole fedi.