@grishka It uses local-only signals for now, though it wouldn't be hard to use federated content.
The key component is ranking signals in a scalable way, so the smallest and largest instances can take advantage.
Local vs Remote doesn't really matter to a new instance when you have no content, and thus discovery becomes more important.
I'm interested to hear more about your idea, I plan to use FediDB and its growing database to bootstrap discovery in Pixelfed.
@dansup @grishka
Indeed that idea sounds intriguing. Btw, there's also "Trunk for the Fediverse" with a concept that might be further integrated into apps, so getting interesting following becomes a lot easier.
https://communitywiki.org/trunk