Gregory's Server
@dangoodin @chartier @JonnyT I think the decentralized nature of The Fediverse actually very much means it *can* be both! It's just that depending on where you are within that network, it has to be at some point on a slider between those two options.
As an example of how this is already a thing that is neither true nor false but something the matters depending on where you are, on *my* single-user instance I do in fact have the ability to search beyond my home instance. It only shows posts my instance in turn knows about, so in practice it's largely the same as searching my own full timeline since there's only me that's causing my server to see any posts in the first place, but it certainly works and would mean any large multiuser instances would provide for journalists and researchers the ability to search for all posts anyone on their server sent or received.
The future is now, it's just unevenly distributed.
I'm on Pleroma; a fork of it, Akkoma, appears to have the option of another, more advanced search backend as well: https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable/configuration/search/
(You may be curious to follow the trail of that other search result which happened to use the same phrasing I copy-pasted as a test, you can pull on that thread at https://toot.cat/@woozle/110667344363350567 ).
As an example of how this is already a thing that is neither true nor false but something the matters depending on where you are, on *my* single-user instance I do in fact have the ability to search beyond my home instance. It only shows posts my instance in turn knows about, so in practice it's largely the same as searching my own full timeline since there's only me that's causing my server to see any posts in the first place, but it certainly works and would mean any large multiuser instances would provide for journalists and researchers the ability to search for all posts anyone on their server sent or received.
The future is now, it's just unevenly distributed.
I'm on Pleroma; a fork of it, Akkoma, appears to have the option of another, more advanced search backend as well: https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable/configuration/search/
(You may be curious to follow the trail of that other search result which happened to use the same phrasing I copy-pasted as a test, you can pull on that thread at https://toot.cat/@woozle/110667344363350567 ).