When simply visiting the landing page for discuss.tchncs.de, the whole page is full of posts in communities that are hosted on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
It鈥檚 a bit foolish because if someone wants to see posts for those communities, they would visit those nodes. If you visit discuss.tchncs.de the main timeline should show you a local timeline.
It would be sensible if someone is logged in to discuss.tchncs.de, in which case their settings would have effect. But it does not make sense to fill the page with foreign posts by non-local users to non-logged-in visitors. There is no user account and no community that traces to discuss.tchncs.de on the landing page.
Of course a visitor can click local, if they are familiar with Lemmy, but all is a shit default.
You could ask their admins why they have their instance configured that way, but I would guess that it is because none of the small number (310) of local communities there are very high traffic: sorting their Local view by New shows that there have been slightly less than 20 posts in the last 3 days and more than half of them are from a single user in a single community.
So, having the logged-out view show All instead of Local by default makes some sense.
Does this mean the instance is inactive? No, it says they have 322 users/day and 827 users/month. So, I assume most logged-in users there also primarily read and post in remote communities.
We鈥檝e discussed this on our instance a few times, the downside to setting local as default is that the instance looks small and hyper-specific to new users. They might not realize that there is a wider network of posts available. Someone who is familiar with how the fediverse works is more likely to know about the different feeds.
A good compromise would be a configurable banner for logged out users, so then an instance can pick either option and leave a note about alternatives
