There is a story [0] from November doing the rounds on Twitter today (but which was flagged on HN) that does a good job of expanding on why there is no search function on Mastodon. Namely, it's* full of child porn, or "lolicon" which is drawn child porn, illegal in many Western nations but not in Japan. In the words of Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko:

> Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to negative social dynamics

I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society?

I did find this 2017 GitHub issue [1] to be slightly less inflammatory and full of fruitful discussion about legal implications of caching strategies for media content on Mastodon instances.

[0] https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847

* "It" being the wider fediverse, where the 2nd and 3rd most popular instances allow "lolicon" content (which is illegal in many jurisdictions). Of course not all of Mastodon is filled with this, but all it takes is an obsessive minority to poison the grapevine with a large amount of content. Also, you can expect generative AI to lead to even more of this stuff.