@FediTips Interesting. It's possible that the way my various clients are searching is just unusual. I mostly had this problem before I imported my own followers, at a time when my instance wasn't federating with other instances yet. I imagine that was a big part of the problem.

@FediTips I deployed this Mastodon server so I got to watch it start with 0 known users. If I enter https://brandnewserver.net/@user, it works. But some clients don't seem to support this. If I enter "@user@brandnewserver.net", that doesn't work because it's performing a search of known users. I wasn't able to enter a profile URL into Mona or some of the other clients I've seen, so had to go to the web interface to search for users. That's not intuitive at all. Has this improved / am I wrong about how it works?

@FediTips I do wish the standard user search function would force a query on the remote server if the username looks like it belongs on another server. E.G. I enter "user@brandnewserver.net", search says "I don't know about that user, but let me reach out to brandnewserver.net and see if the user exists", rather than failing. Little pain points like these feed into the mainstream narrative that the fediverse is complicated. I want to be able to say "No it's not", with conviction.