op thank you for this post. I have a draft of text I'd like to type it's ok. Its related to the topic of Mastodon, not necessarily a reply to the post itself.
Anyway, I'm still trying to learn Mastodon. I do like that we get 500 characters (1000 on techhub.social).
I'm kind of learning I think, that, in order to run a "search", you kind of have to make a post with the search word with a hashtag. So, if I wanted to search for the topic of let's say "weather", on Twitter I search that word. Or even a phrase. On Mastodon, you can't really do that. You have to make a post that has "#weather" in it and then you can click that hashtag to see if anyone else made a post with that hashtag.