@taylorlorenz Remember the history of Mastodon. It was not built in the face of Musk buying twitter. It was built by people who could not be on Twitter safely even when Jack was in charge. Decisions like no text search and no reblogging were in specific responses to the abusive behavior that led Mastodon's creators to do the hard work of setting up an alternative in the first place.

These pre-April 2022 users who still own the majority of large instances and are the active developers of the software did not want a place for Journalists - many would have found the prying and data aggregation journalist do on social media exceedingly distasteful.

unless things change Mastodon will never have the broadcast vibes of Twitter which emphasized views and interactions. This social network emphasizes the building of direct relationships and to use it successfully you need to be ready to spend far more social capital developing trust and reputation then the equivalent Twitter account.

Twitter under Jack Dorsey really catered to journalists and politicians because they brought in lots of views, and it became a great place to not only put out a story, but to develop one as well. Mastodon was designed by people who didn't want their social media interactions on the front page of the New York Times. For that reason, I suspect that journalists, news makers, and politicians will remain on Twitter in spite of Elon Musk. They are to Twitter what live sports has become to cable TV - the one use that a new technology cannot easily disrupt.

@boazbaraktcs Perhaps it would be, but right now such an instance would likely fine itself broadly defederated.

There is history here. A message board called Kiwi Farms developed search tools for the fediverse with the stated intent of finding and harassing LGBT people. Prior to the twitter migration it was probably the most impactful thing to occur in the fediverse. Any instance found to be using Kiwi Farms indexing tools was quickly and aggressively defederated and even instances that federated with those instances were targeted. (Full disclosure: the instance this account uses Qoto.org falls into the latter category and is still on a lot of default block lists)

I'm not saying it will never happen. The project is open source and if there is enough demand someone will write the code. Given the recent history, I would not expect the large legacy instances to change in the near future.