One of the biggest criticisms of Mastodon’s technical capabilities involves how limited its search system is. With a new update, everything has changed.
I’m not sure how valid that criticism is. Reddit’s search is abysmal as well, doesn’t seem to have hurt them.
@fazalmajid Maybe so, but Mastodon historically has only allowed users to look up other users, search hashtag indexes, and depending on the server, search your own posts. A lot of this was done under the pretense of protecting users from harassment, but it’s a bandaid covering over insufficient tooling for post-based interaction capabilities.
Anyway, the bigger problem is that it’s harder to find stuff in federated systems, which can be a big headache for getting new people into the Fediverse. Search isn’t a silver bullet, but it goes a long ways towards making discovery easier.