users have been begging for this features for years, and the devs have ignored them consistently. The only reason they are acquiescing now is because former #Twitter users are begging for it. The devs seem to care more about disaffected #Twitter user feedback than the feedback of the very #Mastodon users who have helped build #Mastodon up to what it is today.

Is this type of behavior deserving of thanks?

Yes, it deserves thanks. Search in a distributed network is a very complex capability requiring a great deal of development and testing effort. People tend to grossly underestimate the difficulty of rolling out new capacities in production software used by millions of people. Whether it could have be implemented sooner is something that can be debated, but the truth is that it is here now, and seems to work very well. It is very deserving of our thanks and support.

#support

community feedback, while listening to feedback from former #Twitter users who are rejecting #Mastodon due to the lack of this feature.

Also @alex how hard is functional search to actually integrate? I couldn’t imagine it being that hard, but you’ve done it before, so I’m sure you’d know better than me.

@mastodonmigrationAbsolutely. They already have full text search, it was just a matter of removing the intentional restrictions they placed on it. This is why Gab and Truth Social were able to immediately fix search.

I will say, search is hard. Mastodon requires running a separate ElasticSearch instance to do it. But they already had that working for years.