about mastodon. i love centralized social networks because you can search for any post, regardless of the date of its creation, any person, any community. in mastodon, however, this does not work.
when you register on a small instance, people's profiles are empty, there are no posts, hashtags do not work.
if you register on a medium-sized instance, it's already better, but there are still people who are not subscribed to from someone from your instance and their profiles are empty, and even if someone is subscribed, only posts which are shown are ones that were created after the subscription of person from your instance, older are not, and the person may have been maintaining this account for a lot longer, post history preservation is broken. hashtags are already available, but still not all of them, because not all posts are available too (hashtags work like a filter for post).
if you register on a large instance, small ones will defederate from you and you will see neither their hashtags, nor interesting people, nor their posts.
there is a feeling of distortion of reality, which is a nasty feeling in itself.
i know about the problems of centralized social networks and do not idealize them, not in any case. i'm talking about this particular aspect that I like
So use them. I don't know where the communication breakdown is here. You like centralized social networks. USE THEM THEN. I can't see why this is so confusing to you.
You didn't discover the potential of open social networks yet, and you admire walled gardens because of that. You will not actually need global search inside a fediverse app, because with Fediverse's open architecture you will be eventually able to search any post on fedi (for Mastodon, only for consenting accounts, though) simply via an Internet search engine!
No, you are disappointed that Mastadon doesn’t have the same feature set as Twitter. The fact that you can search off instance at all is impressive. What you are asking for is like saying you should find GM cars in Ford’s search bar. Each instance is its own website. Search engines are designed to do what you want, and as Mastadon grows in popularity, it’s search results will become more prominent.
Weird hill to die on but ok. If you want to see past posts, you can just go to the users' instance and browse their instance. You don't have to view it from your own.
I think jumping into the fediverse requires rethinking the paradigm of how you use social media.
> when you register on a small instance, people’s profiles are empty, there are no posts, hashtags do not work.
Not a big problem for me, I just go to big instances like mastodon.social and find content or people I'd like interact with. Being registered on some instance doesn't mean you shouldn't visit other instances.