@jik I'm on the big one, mastodon social. Over the last year I've slowing been inferring how likes, replies, edits, notifications, tags are distributed. I think certain messages/events are slow or fail to happen when they need to go to from small instances. It is all very black box to me.
e.g. I see n likes and got notifications for <n, some instances have way more posts for a tag than others, etc.