I still think it should be possible to search on Mastodon for any post you've specifically loaded in the last 24 hours. I cannot conceive what the privacy downsides of that would be.
I am trying to find a post I was looking at not ten minutes ago by the infosec person with the Marvin the Martian avatar. I could solve this problem by asking "hey who's the guy with the Marvin the Martian avatar" but the last time I did this dozens of people responded by tagging him, flooding Jose mentions, which I absolutely did not and do not want, so I had to delete the posts, which also means I can't go back and check the replies

It's not Mike Isaac. I'm sure of that, he was the Charmin bear. Maybe eventually I will just scroll through all 500 people I follow.

For the record, I don't remember ANY of y'all's usernames or handles. I only remember your avatars. if you ever change your avatar you will become like a new person to me.

@mcc You are thinking of @\[email protected]
@mcc and lol at the fact I missed what you said about endless people tagging them. I guess I'm just different.

@mcc that literally happened to me on another social media & I unfollowed by accident lol

The power of an avatar...

@mcc
Semi-related, i can add personal notes to profiles on mastodon... Wonder if one can search those notes in any useful way...
@mcc
There are a number of limitations in the UX
@mcc "I know I saw something about BLAH in my feed recently...." yeah this is a problem I have all the time.
@onelson it encourages pathological use where you bookmark any post you find yourself thinking even a little bit about
@mcc I also suffer this

@onelson @mcc

I guess at least we can bookmark here...I'm also on Bluesky, and with no bookmarks there I find myself either missing stuff completely, or doing screen grabs of any post with links or content I don't have time to read/watch/listen to at the time, then flicking through pics later to search for specific handles to find them again... 😬

@mcc As a workaround, have you tried @phanpy's Catch-up feature? It can load all posts from the last 12+ hours (the upper limit depends on your instance) and shows them in a compact UI. And then you can simply Ctrl+F.
@mcc fwiw if you liked or bookmarked a post it is indexed and searchable with the in:library filter
@mcc a nice thing about having your own instance is you can just run a sql query