Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon main branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉 It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time. We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.
That’s how you grow as a social network. See Facebook, Twitter, etc. They all are walled gardens interacting with noone else. The mastodon devs may have taken example from that.
Right. That’s how you grow a walled garden network. That’s why I’m criticizing them. Mastodon is not a social network; it’s software that connects to the network, which is the fediverse.