Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well..
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It's also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn't a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it's still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?
It's all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Some Lemmy apps do allow you to block posts by keywords. But this isn't built into the account itself, just the local app filter.
On Mastodon, they do actually let you filter out posts by keywords and it syncs with your account. No matter what device you use or switch to it will remember your filter settings.
I don't think one person should decide for everyone on the whole Fedi, what people can see I would argue to leave this to specific instance moderators. The instance moderators themselves should be able to filter out words, and also what terms they filter out for everyone absolutely must be transparent so users know what is filtered out on a server by server basis