1) Only the user has a full view of engagement at any time, and generally only the user's home instance has anything resembling a "full" view of conversations/replies (and even that is going to not show things private to the user). This is a bit of a natural consequence of the federation model. You may be surprised if you follow posts from popular accounts to their home instances how much additional conversation shows up that your own instance isn't seeing (for all sorts of reasons). This is going to be especially the case in the Federeated timeline because some of the Federated timeline is already "one degree out" from the what the instance is naturally following and it won't pick up the next degree.
2) There is some pushback in parts of the Mastodon community against "popular" accounts from the perspective of other social media and there are a bunch of Mastodon denizens that don't converse with "traditionally popular" accounts such as celebrities/"Influencers" and many even actively mute and block anyone that seems more of a "Brand" than a person or that themselves act like Mastodon is primarily a "write only"/"boost mostly"/"self-advertise" media. In my experience the most active conversations on Mastodon are among people you "wouldn't expect" to be popular or in deep, weird, fun hashtags like #Monsterdon.
1) Only the user has a full view of engagement at any time, and generally only the user's home instance has anything resembling a "full" view of conversations/replies (and even that is going to not show things private to the user). This is a bit of a natural consequence of the federation model. You may be surprised if you follow posts from popular accounts to their home instances how much additional conversation shows up that your own instance isn't seeing (for all sorts of reasons). This is going to be especially the case in the Federeated timeline because some of the Federated timeline is already "one degree out" from the what the instance is naturally following and it won't pick up the next degree.
2) There is some pushback in parts of the Mastodon community against "popular" accounts from the perspective of other social media and there are a bunch of Mastodon denizens that don't converse with "traditionally popular" accounts such as celebrities/"Influencers" and many even actively mute and block anyone that seems more of a "Brand" than a person or that themselves act like Mastodon is primarily a "write only"/"boost mostly"/"self-advertise" media. In my experience the most active conversations on Mastodon are among people you "wouldn't expect" to be popular or in deep, weird, fun hashtags like #Monsterdon.