Ah yeah–that is confusing here. I think there’s a lot of UI improvements that are sure to come. For some reason there are two searches–a post search and a magazine search. The post search is the one that’s visible on the top bar, and the magazine search is in the magazines tab (that lists all magazines), and in my experience is pretty good. If I search “tech” I get results from all sorts of instances.
All in all there’s a lot of room for improvement, but it’s such a young piece of software that I’m pretty confident it (and lemmy) will improve pretty rapidly in the coming months/years
I’m torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn’t super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what’s going on.
I think Beehaw’s decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They’ve already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.