INTRO TO FEDERATION:

1. "mastodon" is a piece of software that runs on a server. There's a lot of servers that run it & u can follow ppl on other servers.

2. When u follow someone from another server, your server receives their toots.

3. The federated TL is all public toots that the server receives, ie all of the toots from everyone that ppl on your server follow.

4. ERGO: if u want to see more toots in the fed TL, follow + get other ppl on your server to follow ppl from other servers!

@chr - I was just trying to find someone from the mastodon.social/ server using their handle, but they don't show up in search results. Does search work across servers?

@gideonro @chr Doesn't seem like it? Which is quite a bad situation. Here's hoping it's high on the priority list of @gargron :fingers_crossed: (which I'm sure is already huuuge with all kinds of great and important stuff :D )

@forteller @Gargron @chr - got it working. You just have to specify the server along with the name and then it shows up.

@gideonro @chr @gargron What if you don't know the server and that's why you're searching. Also: searching for words and hashtags is important to find people to follow and just as a way to use the communications system (e.g. 'what are people saying about X nowadays?')

@forteller @Gargron @chr @gideonro There's definitely an opportunity for someone to build a huuuuge index of users and toots, and make it searchable. Would be interesting to see different people trying different approaches and open-sourcing their code. Twitter didn't have its own search originally; search started as a completely separate company.