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.
Note that they did it in the most mastodon way possible. Non-mastodon accounts won’t appear in search until their software stops their own work and implements a masto-specific feature.
https://oisaur.com/users/renchap/statuses/110948896985289761
That’s the only possible way to make it opt-in. People using other software deserve privacy too
I still don’t think search for public posts needs to be opt-in. But even ignoring that, my point was that mastodon merged this change without coordinating with other projects. They didn’t check what the easiest way to signal an opt-in would be for other projects. They made the decision unilaterally and now other projects will be left out of masto search by default. And if their users want to be searchable from mastodon, they have to stop working on features for their own project and work on this.
My issue is just that mastodon never respects other projects enough to coordinate, makes decisions that affect other projects without input from them, implements features that further isolate mastodon users from the rest of the fediverse or makes it harder for them to interact.