Ugh, almost NONE of the important posts I’ve seen about the Arizona ruling were tagged with #arizona, let alone #courts, #abortion, or a number of other tags. Tags were never supposed to replace search. Not ever. Unless the fediverse—or at least Mastodon’s network—gets past this objection to global search, it’s never going to matter as much as we like to believe it should.
Hastags were meant to be way to casually suggest related topics in the most general way for people with limited search skills. They were never meant to be a precoordinated taxonomic scheme for organizing all topics in a social media ecosystem. I now use Threads. Bluesky, or Twitter for search. This way lies irrelevancy for Mastodon. It’s all but useless for discovery. That’s just the reality.
And anyone claiming that searching for tags, users, and profiles has any real value for discovery, simply doesn’t have much experience searching for content. Mastdon’s search is literally more trouble than it’s worth.
But that’s true only on the major mastodon sites. Posts on Journa.host, toad.social, or many other sites are not included. And even the search of supported site is frustrating to use because the search UI and UX is less than optimal, to be generous about it. It’s painful to use.
Add comment