In decentralized networks, whether federated or p2p, there is often no global search functionality, as no node has a unified view of the network. This section covers methods of content discovery in decentralized social networks.
Mastodon has no global search functionality. This issue being discussed in Mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/9529
Servers store content from users followed by members of the server. Mastodon users are presented with three timelines: a home timeline with posts from accounts the user follows, a local timeline with posts from the local instance, and a federated timeline with all posts that have been retrieved from remote instances.
All conversations on Matrix take place through rooms, which people either join (if public), peek into (if viewable), or are invited to. Because of its focus on conversations in rooms, there is no focus on having globally discoverable content.
Content is propagated and discovered through follow relationships in the ssb network. When a follow relationship is initiated, the posts of the user being followed begins to be synced to the follower's node. Those messages and files are stored locally on the user's computer, indefinitely, for applications running ssb to read.
