@ivory I take it back. Seems like searching for words is very limited on Mastodon in general. On my instance website I searched "Apple" and all that showed up in Posts was your post about the Ivory app.
Coming from Twitter, my expectations are that a search query returns results whether or not they are a hashtag.
Feels like hashtags are therefor more important on Mastodon, because all other words seem to be ignored, which makes Mastodon seem a lot quieter than it really is. I'm still learning!
@markpaterson yes, I believe part of it is the decentralized nature of the service. But another part is the creators of Mastodon didn't want a global search to make it easier for people find general discussions and reply with negativity.