@Codex ☯️♈☮ The "anti-search" minority is not anti-search per se.

But Fediverse-wide search is only technically possible with something central. And what these people do not want is any kind of central elements in the Fediverse.

Anything central, be it search or whatever, will allow one single person or one group of people to assume control and power over the whole Fediverse. Some say that Eugen Rochko already has too much power as he a) is the developer behind 99% of the Fediverse, b) can basically dictate in which way all other Fediverse projects develop, otherwise they stop being compatible with Mastodon, and c) runs the two biggest Mastodon instances.

It's even worse when some happy-go-lucky fellow who seems to neither know nor care about FLOSS launches a no-opt-in, not-even-opt-out central search engine for the Fediverse and makes it proprietary and closed-source. Not only could he take over the whole Fediverse, but you can't even check the inner workings of the search engine to see whether or not it's prepared for just that.

A central search engine could also be or become the property of a for-profit company. For one, this means that search results are being filled with ad spam by paying customers, and/or searches are being sold to Google or any other Big Data hoarder and broker. Besides, the for-profit that runs the search engine could be bought out by some Silicon Valley gigacorporation. And with it essentially the whole Fediverse because the whole Fediverse depends on it.

Allegedly "anti-search" people only appear to be anti-search because all attempts at creating a Fediverse-wide or even only Mastodon-wide search functionality were centralised. And because all widely-known attempts at creating something central were search crawlers.