Thanks for putting so much time and thought into the discussion. All the problems you talk about exist for every search engine in actual use today. For example, publishing a site on a brand new domain has the exact problem you’re describing with spinning up a new Forte instance. There can be a 24-hr lag before DNS can reliably find the site. Perfect search is an aspirational goal. The realistic goal is to satisfy most needs. No matter how many words you throw at it, I don’t think federated search is an outlandish idea at all.

Doesn’t seem to me like you did anything serious enough to be banned from a whole platform, but moderators and administrators are individuals and some of them can’t be objective when something presses their person hot buttons. If a right-wing Christian claimed abortion was Sexual Assault, that obviously would not automatically make abortion an off-limits topic, but I can imagine a moderator thinking differently. I agree with your response that nobody was being forced into anything, but using loaded words like “woke” is a good way to get yourself labeled by someone who thinks in memes.

What if search itself were a federated function? Although I’m a software dev I really don’t know much about the mechanics of large-scale search engines such as Google, but I know their server farms somehow share the load of performing searches and maintaining whatever database they maintain to optimize searching. Seems like the fediverse could do search in a similar way. I’m just saying your critique of the idea, although well thought out, seems like a critique of a particular strategy. It’s not obvious to me that the very idea of federated search is outlandish.