@jean I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative. Perhaps there’s something I can do to help? You know I enjoy writing documentations, I can also explain the Discover section better (once I get it myself). Let me know 
Nope, I didn’t read it as negative. It’s a helpful observation. After Micro Camp, I will get to this. I have been rewriting in my head for a while, so it will be nice to get it on “paper”.
Something that gets neglected in the ‘Discover’ debate is probably the size of Micro.blog. Rough estimates done by others put the numbers at below 10K people, and most are active at varying degrees. I rather we not use the DAU and MAU metrics, but it may inform why discovery on Micro.blog is difficult. Perhaps, there aren’t that many people to discover. Also, the community is largely homogenous (in terms of interests).
I’ll return to my original thesis that perhaps trying to find many people based on your existing interests may not work well on Micro.blog, but if you are willing to explore other interests, you may find many people and join their community. But that doesn’t stop you from talking about your existing interests coz you never know who may be out there who hasn’t expressed that interest in the feat that there’s no one out there to talk about it.
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I didn’t see your reply earlier. This helps putting things in perspective, thanks!
And homogenous in other ways as well.
What evidence/research do you have that proves this to be true?
If I was interested in other interests how I would I find people with those other interests? We are going in circles here.
Serendipity 
If I believed in serendipity I would routinely buy a lottery ticket. I don’t.
That’s not what I meant. Lottery tickets are based on luck for a predetermined outcome (“money!”).
You don’t go out looking for other interests. You may not even know what you are looking for or are even looking for. You read along other people’s conversations about the things they are interested in and are talking about (others may be doing the same with your conversations). If it piques your interest, you drop into the conversation and ask questions. Most are willing to welcome more people into their fold. Of course, you may be more likely to find particular interests than others on Micro.blog.
Mostly observation on other social networks. For example, if there’s a divisive trending hashtag on Twitter, other people will jump in and act combative toward strangers that they don’t actually follow.
This may be true on Twitter but folks on Micro.blog are better, no? Since the community is small, it’s much easier to police using existing tools like Mute and Block.
I hope that’s true! Just responding to @khurtwilliams’s comment and what our thinking was to not have search right now. (I do have a lot of things I want to do with search, but possibly more around blog search and less timeline search.)
Hashtags support would be amazing but If we can’t have that …
How about MB approved list of “Topics” that you can register your blog under as, then other blog owners can search through list of people under the Topics that they might want to follow.
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This is what Emoji tags are for-- less whole blogs but posts, which might lead to blogs. Whether it’s effective or not, it’s at least present. Emoji in Discover
I just did a few minutes of searching from the discovery page and am surprised and disappointed at the results. I think I’d assumed it worked better… or worked at all. That a keyword search for, say, WWDC23 would turn up posts with that somewhere in the text. My search result was one post.
So I think I’m misunderstanding the point of search. What is it for if not to find posts with content?
Search currently only searches users and posts that have been featured in Discover, not all posts. This is something we reevaluate from time to time, and I’ve been experimenting with some other things around search. Searching just for “WWDC” should return many more posts.
I had just got used to Mastodon’s approach - no searching (to avoid harassment), everything is by hashtag. How do you make it work? You can follow hashtags as well as people to enrich your feed, and I quite like it.
I’ve transferred here (and @manton, I do love it) and am a bit surprised that you can do neither. I mean, the people I follow are great obviously, but they don’t have everything interesting to say; nor are they aware of every topic. Being able, at least, to follow hashtags (like Mastodon etc) or by search/word (probably more complicated for a variety of reasons) would be very helpful.
Perhaps that, coupled with the ability for those not wishing to be searched to lock down their profiles to followers only?
Side note - when hashtags are included, although irrelevant at micro.blog, do they work on federated sites?
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Thanks for joining! We do want to keep improving search. There’s a lot more we can do here.
For hashtags to Mastodon, yes, even though Micro.blog won’t link hashtags automatically, if you have hashtags in your post, when someone follows you from Mastodon those hashtags will be linked to Mastodon’s hashtag search, so they feel like normal Mastodon posts.
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yea i guess lol