Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon main branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉 It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time. We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.
Note that they did it in the most mastodon way possible. Non-mastodon accounts won’t appear in search until their software stops their own work and implements a masto-specific feature.
https://oisaur.com/users/renchap/statuses/110948896985289761
That’s the only possible way to make it opt-in. People using other software deserve privacy too