

Fediverse works like newsletters via email. If you search for an account on a different server, only the last few items are (sometimes) pulled and shown on your local instance. Only after subscribing/following that other account, you’ll get new(!) updates sent to your local server. For older messages, you’ll have to visit the other account’s server.
Maybe those 2 photos you see were shared with gram.social earlier.






Posts can also get synced if someone from gram.social searched for a direct link to a post. E.g. if you go to gram.social and search for
https://pixelfed.social/p/pixuser/1234, it’ll get synced in the background and show up if you follow@pixuserlater on. (Depending on how long the instance caches it.)Likes and Reshares of external posts are local to their instance. Those won’t get sent to other instances. E.g. on my private GotoSocial I don’t see the correct amount of likes or reshares of posts from other instances. I’ll have to visit the posts on their original instance for that. (But then, I rarely care.)