Gregory's Server
Oh one more just occurred to me! I don't know if this is what anybody means by "find people" when they're complaining of difficulty doing so on the Fediverse verse, but it seems plausible if unobvious, so:
6) "How do I find people who are talking about a specific topic at a given moment?" Here I'm not talking about finding a standing scene, but rather things like trending hashtags or topics that surface on search. If I hear a loud noise in my city, theoretically I could check Twitter, using it search function, to see if there are people talking about that loud noise they just heard in #$mytown. If I want to know what opinions are about a referendum we're going to vote on, I could search Twitter for the referendum number and state.
The purpose isn't to find people to follow or scene to join. It's totally ad hoc, and the purpose is to find information. But the way you found that information on Twitter was by finding the people who were discussing the information you wanted.
@kissane
This is something it seems, again, may work okay on very large instances (though honestly I've not found it to work very well even on Universeodon), and not at all on smaller instances.
Also now that I think about it, I want to stress sometimes people have problems making the Fediverse work for them because they are trying to do something on the Fediverse that, actually, you can't. For instance, even if the Fediverse technologically supported surfacing discussions like the ones I describe here, that doesn't mean those discussions are happening in the first place! It would be great if I could search the whole Fediverse for recent posts about my town, but that doesn't mean anybody's actually talking about my town on the Fediverse.
This problem also shows up for trying to join a scene. Even if Mastodon et al. supported scenes in their discovery as well as Twitter does, that doesn't mean those scenes exist here.
@kissane
This is something it seems, again, may work okay on very large instances (though honestly I've not found it to work very well even on Universeodon), and not at all on smaller instances.
Also now that I think about it, I want to stress sometimes people have problems making the Fediverse work for them because they are trying to do something on the Fediverse that, actually, you can't. For instance, even if the Fediverse technologically supported surfacing discussions like the ones I describe...