As far as I know, one of the headline features of microblogging networks is searching and following hashtags. On top of that, Mastodon (like Lemmy) tells users that it’s not important what server/instance you join, because of federation.
With Lemmy, I find it easy to search and interact with communities across all the federated instances. Chances are, people on my local instance (even if it’s relatively small) will have already interacted with popular communities for a given topic, so they will be easy to discover. However with Mastodon this concept seems totally broken – when I search a hashtag I want to see everything, and related posts might be spread out over hundreds of small servers for which, apparently, my small server has no content populated. With Lemmy, I understand that content gets populated on my local instance when somebody else on my instance has interacted with it before. I just don’t understand how this approach is feasible with for a system like Mastodon. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server?
Yes. Your server Admin would have to enable this on the server. They may not be aware that this is available or they may not want to use it because it does consume database and media space which they may not have available.