Discoverability remains a terrible experience on #mastodon. I can give a real example of this from today:
I was texting with a friend, and they mentioned that they were on mastodon, so I said I'm @pwinn and their response was to say it is difficult to find people on mastodon. First they tried searching the web generally for me, but that didn't seem to give the result they needed.
I told them that I had learned recently that you can paste a person's URL into your mastodon search box and it automatically does the right thing, but when they tried, they didn't have my URL, so that didn't work either.
What they needed was to paste the url `https://qoto.org/@pwinn` into their mastodon search box, because mastodon knows what to do with that, but not what to do with a fully-qualified username.
This is, of course, ridiculous. I'd bring it up on HackerNews, but I have already gotten one "submit a pull request then" response there when talking about mastodon, so I'll just kvetch about it for now.
@pwinn if servers are not connected (federated) then it can be that certain information is not provided.
Qoto.org is known to not be federated with lots of other servers because the rules of the server don't align with rules of other servers.
@barefootstache Oh, right! I saw that qoto.org is on the hachyderm list, not sure how widespread use of that list is, nor why it's on there exactly.
Ah, mastodon.
@pwinn the main reason iirc is that on qoto you have free speech which lots of other instances don't like. E.g. here you can swear, talk about genders, bigotry, and any other topic openly. This is frowned upon most of the rest of the fediverse.
There are only really a couple of options forward: either you or the other party can migrate to an instance, where this issue is prevalent. Or you could create a secondary account that is in the regulated speech cluster.
Edits, since there is no preview feature. I said I'm at-pwinn-at-qoto.org initially, but with @-symbols in place of the "at-" strings, which mastodon helpfully rewrites and links to make the narrative look odd. In fact, I cannot figure out any way to actually include my address as text. Wrapping it in backticks didn't help.
Also, when I search for my friend's @username@server identity, it finds them. Not sure why it didn't for them in reverse!