Translations:F.A.Q. - Frequently Asked Questions/11/en

Your home timeline shows posts by accounts you follow and boosts by those accounts. There is no algorithm sorting posts for "relevance". Everything will appear in the chronological order it was either posted or boosted. Everything in your timeline will have the same look whether it originated from a Mastodon account or an account from some other Fediverse service.
The local timeline displays all the public posts accounts on your server published - boosts are exlcuded. This can be very interesting on themed instances. The federated timeline shows posts from the whole Fediverse as your server knows it. It includes posts from every account your server was introduced to either by someone following or successfully searching from your server.