It’s hard not to overstate how much of a big deal it is that Mastodon is adopting this kind of search functionality. Mastodon still makes up a vast portion of the Fediverse.
While other platforms have supported this for way longer, having buy-in by the biggest player in the space will probably have a huge effect on standard expectations moving forward.
Yeah, I feel like they’d probably get better mileage with something like Meilisearch, which is what Firefish uses for search.