Ben | Hypixel Studios
GMate8@codename_B so from your instance, yes! But from mastodon.social and mastodon.online, you can see, there are plenty of people using the hashtags. I always recommend people to check out other instances when they search for peeps, because some of them you can't reach from yours!
@gmate8 oh! Is there a global search?
@codename_B no, there are only instances and I search on the most popular ones in general
You can easily discover users this way, you couldn't do without. For example, if someone follows you on an instance (like mastodon.online) you'll appear with your hashtags and timelines on that instance. If they don't then don't. This is why it's important to look on other sources too.
@codename_B what you're currently talking about is indexing of the whole Fediverse, or at least Mastodon and from that building up a standalone search engine. That hasn't been done yet, as far as I know. Only PeerTube supports some kind of search engine (global search) for PeerTube videos (via sepiasearch.org)