@zonarolo Yea, most mastodon servers only let you search on hashtags and not free text. As such hash tags are used a lot since its the best way to be seen in a search.

That said QOTO is somewhat unique (we arent the only ones) who allow free form text searches. We are also one of the oldest servers with an unpurged index. Meaning we are one of **very** few servers that lets you search back to the earlier days of the fediverse and has a very large portion of the entire fediverse history in our database.