[masukomi]

it will not search "all instances".

It will search a subset of instances.

How do we know this to be true?

a) there is no central listing of all mastodon instances, or even all public ones.

b) it would take FREAKING AGES TO COME BACK because there are so damn many, you can only make so many parallel requests at a time, and you have to process the results from all of them.

[qchris]

Can you expand on b)? I'm not sure I understand why this would be difficult. If you already had a list of instances, as it seems like asynchronous clients could probably handle the scale of instances (source below list about 4k, which isn't out of scope for simultaneous async tasks), and processing the results is probably fairly simple. Especially if you were to cache that list and just do an updated request every few minutes (so not a new full-network request set every query) it seems like this wouldn't be too crazy complicated. Have I missed something?

[1] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/