[metabagel]

> They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)

Amen and hallelujah! This is why I gave up on Mastodon. I read that not allowing full text search across instances was actually a design decision in order to discourage brigading. But, more crucially it undermines discovery.

[wizzwizz4]

Full-text search is now allowed, but it only searches for posts you've interacted with (in:library) and those associated with accounts that have opted-in to it.

[WorldMaker]

Only available on instances willing to pay the hosting costs for an Elasticache cluster.

If someone want full-text search across the entire fediverse, who is going to pay for it? Bluesky has a business model that makes that attractive to them as a value add to pay for. ActivityPub has instances running on RPis in a shoebox. (This is a great thing, it's part of where ActivityPub federation works well.)

Of course, that's also before you get into the sociopolitics that many instances don't want full text search and are concerned about brigading and pulling old microblog posts out of context for nefarious reasons; some of which is why some instances left services like Twitter and have no interest in services like Bluesky.