kjjhhhhyy

No, this isn't really true, once you interact with another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content.

The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances

I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server

There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised

So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is

As an admin: no thanks.