Mastodon has a serious discovery problem. IIRC, searches are only within your own instance, except for hashtag searches. This appears to have been an intentional design decision to prevent brigading / pile-ons.

For me, I found it too difficult to locate "my peeps" on other instances, so I switched to Bluesky.

I like it for my use case. It's more like the community around forum instances in the old days. The internet is too big.