kษ:สณ 
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?
@chr - got it. Tks. Just taking a little while to get used to the way things work here.
@b_cavello @gideonro yeah i found out a bit later that it works for anyone that your server has brought in for other reasons
@chr Are you sure that that is required? I found someone who hadn't even yet posted anything. I did include his server address though...
@gideonro sometimes people are brought into masto instances without any of their posts having been brought in, i haven't figured out why yet
@b_cavello Yeah, me too. I just didn't initially know I had to include the server address.
@chr - nevermind. Just figured it out. You need to specify the server too. Just like email.
@forteller @Gargron @chr - got it working. You just have to specify the server along with the name and then it shows up.
@Gargron @chr @forteller - still, seems like if I type a user name, it'd be nice to see a list of possible matches on different servers. That's going to take some sort of master registry though, which I'm not sure exists. No idea how this thing is architected.
@forteller @gideonro @gargron
- deprioritizing being able to search for words was an intentional design decision to prevent dogpiling/namesearching
- fuzzy searching names on other servers could increase load a lot and would almost certainly only show people from servers yours has communicated with before (that being said it might be possible to do in a limited capacity)
@chr @Gargron @forteller - yes, and if there is a centralized registry, that kinda takes away from the whole idea, I suppose.
@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.
@josh @Gargron @chr @forteller - I didn't realize that about Twitter, Josh. Seems like that would end up being a massive synchronization job for a federated platform like this - kind of like a giant email registry in the cloud.
@gideonro @josh @Gargron @chr @forteller Just stumbled across this, that'd be pretty darn cool.
@gideonro if you know the exact handle, you can search for that and it'll bring up their profile on your server. fuzzy matching only works for local accounts