I tried to migrate from mastodon.social to vivaldi for the 1000+ character limit. I found out that it doesn't display favorites from accounts that aren't on vivaldi. I made an account on toot.cat and the same thing happened. Also I can't see the trending section in my toot.cat account. Isn't mastodon supposed to show faves from all servers? Why is this happening?
That's just how it is. You can only see favs if the post is on your instance, or if the fav is from your server. A fav from a remote instance to another remote instance is not known to your instance.
It's the same on mastodon.social but not as noticeable because it's so big
I don't feel like looking up the issue on GitHub, but Gargon once explained that he doesn't want to change this mechanism, as otherwise instances would falsify non-existent likes and thus manipulate the system.
The actual likes are therefore only visible on the instance from which the post originated, as every like is transferred to this instance.
For the sake of refreshing outdated information here, Mastodon 4.4 does now show remote favourite and boost counts where available (see https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/mastodon-4-4-for-devs/) and also has an experimental feature to pull in remote replies. Obviously it will take some time for servers to update to the newer release, but we’re moving forward to improvements here!