I understand the big picture for how mastodon works, but I am constantly running into edge cases where I don’t know what to expect. Has anyone made a decision tree diagram (or flow chart) to show how Mastodon decides whether to show me someone’s post, and where to show it?

A complete decision tree would cover at least the following settings:

  1. Post settings: Public; unlisted; etc.
  2. Individual connections: Individual follow, mute, block, etc.
  3. Boosts and replies
  4. Instance-level moderation (same server, suspended, silenced)
  5. timelines (home, local, federated), hashtag search, thread-view