Probably not only over the search issue, but generally over what the #Fediverse shall be.

One faction is the "old guard" that values Free Software, open-source, privacy, actual security, decentrality, federation, online services developed and run by the community etc. Many of them have been around before there was Mastodon, and Mastodon was launched in 2016. These people typically use the Fediverse through a desktop browser running on GNU/Linux.

They strongly oppose any central/centralistic structures in the Fediverse. They've got very good reasons to do so. The same goes for commercial, for-profit entities bringing proprietary, non-free products into the Fediverse.

The other faction makes up the vast majority of the #TwitterMigration newcomers. They don't care for any of the above. All they want is the Fediverse as a whole to be as easy to understand and to use as Twitter. Many only use the Fediverse through the official Mastodon app on an iPhone or a smartphone with manufacturer-issued Android.

They staunchly demand there be central structures if they make things easier for them. In fact, I guess many would love to see the whole Fediverse being reduced to only Mastodon and then Mastodon being turned into a centralised, monolithic silo so that nobody will ever have to know what instances are and choose one ever again.

Oh, and they usually absolutely despise tech-talk with a raging, burning passion. Even more so if it's about something they neither know nor understand (Free Software, open-source, Linux, Nextcloud, Raspberry Pi, anything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon, what happens behind their Mastodon app etc.).

Platform-wise, I can see a split happen between Mastodon and everything else. Mastodon doesn't care if it's compatible to anything else. It's increasingly becoming a walled garden within the Fediverse. I can actually see it either deliberately break existing ActivityPub standards or even fork ActivityPub or invent its own protocol if that's more convenient than sticking to vanilla ActivityPub.

The more difficult it becomes for other projects to federate with Mastodon, the more projects might decide it's no longer worth trying if it meant they'd have to overthrow basic principles of their own. They might even gradually introduce something more sophisticated than ActivityPub, e.g. Nomad, and then abandon ActivityPub, also to get out of reach of ActivityPub-introducing corporate silos such as Tumblr.