An answer just popped into my mind. Gossip doesn't load every event for everybody that you follow.. going back to the big bang and filling in all the gaps that you missed. Instead, it only loads the very recent events and presents a LOAD MORE button to get further back in time. If you wake up in the morning and start gossip, you might only be seeing events from the last hour or two. When you drill into a person, it gets their most recent 35 events which would go back probably much further as it loads those from the relays.