I guess I fall into the author’s webhead category and I still don’t understand the issue with search. I’m specifically talking about third-party search engines, not built into AP software.

All fediverse posts on all software (that I’ve used or know of) have an ActivityPub representation (the json blob) and an html representation (the page you see if you click the post’s url). Search has been a part of the web as long as I’ve been using it and as a commenter on the post said, decentralization is heavily dependent on indexing/search. Without it, you have a major discoverability problem, which is a consistent critique of the fediverse.

I’ve seen ppl mention users have an expectation of privacy, but I find that hard to believe. Post from multiple social sites (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, etc) are indexed in most search engines and users are used to that and know that public posts are searchable. As a user, you have multiple tools to keep your posts from being indexed and most fediverse software has decent moderation tools so you can handle any incoming issues that do occur.

EDIT: A relevant comment from the HN post:

It’s also unethical to make promises to users, like privacy for posts published to a semipublic social network, that software can’t possibly keep.