Actually I only pay $20/month for a hosted opensearch server for my Mastodon instance. I think a lot of people on Mastodon are against full text search for ideological reasons.
Dude's personal life is a mess but you can't deny his amazing talent. It's good to see he's back with a new album. Hopefully he stays clean and healthy.
I started paying for Kagi a few months ago and I'm loving it. Search results and tools are great. People balk at paying for a search engine, but at least this way I know I'm not the product.
This is what happens when you launch with no content discovery features, so you have to whore yourself out and follow anyone and everyone if you want to get any attention. "Content creators" and clout chasers are the primary customer of this service, so without that I don't know why they'd want to use it.
CalcKey just rebranded to Firefish. It has a very pretty UI but UX is currently bad as there is no way to globally disable boosts so you will see the same posts in your timeline over and over and over again. Following hashtags is limited to the Antennas feature so you won't see those posts in your timeline. Until they fix these things it's unusable for me personally.
Have you tried Akkoma or Pleroma? I run an Akkoma instance at https://shrediverse.net if you want to try it out. You can use the web app or an app like Fedilab on Android.
Currently, AT protocol is mostly theoretical because it's newer and a lot of things haven't been implemented yet . ActivityPub is much more widespread, but some of the ideas for AT protocol would be great in ActivityPub, like better account portability.
This is one of the best things about Kbin!