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