@sod Yeah, I’d tried using google/duckduckgo site search some time back for keywords. The problem with this method is vagueness. The results I get point to users but not individual posts and very little context is provided. Upon clicking on any of the results I’m not taken to a user’s blog but to their micro.blog feed. So, it’s better than nothing but feels just one step above useless.

I somewhat agree with you on bypassing the focus on blogging software and just search the internet. Thanks for the links I’ll check them out.

But, all that said, a part of the appeal of micro.blog is that it has the potential to serve as a home base on the internet. The limitations of the curated timeline would be a non-issue if there were some sort of improved opt-in full search.

In the current iteration, the simplicity of micro.blog actually makes some users work harder for worse results. I have to do a work around Google site search for very vague results. The result is that the “community” aspect of micro.blog is reduced for me. It feels like an increasingly smaller side branch of my daily online experience.

By comparison, I can do a keyword search from my Mastodon app of choice and get a listing of posts. It works very well, problem solved for me. And I’ve manually added some of the micro.blog folks I follow to my Mastodon. Again, that’s more work for me but it’s allowing me to have a more integrated space.

My recent posts and replies to posts on micro.blog are just as much observations of concern for micro.blog as a platform. At the moment it is the best ActivityPub blogging host. But I am fairly certain I’m not the only one that is unsatisfied with one of its main features.