I realized that if I want more people to engage w/ content, I have to be the change I want to see. I interact w/ content more regularly as a result

Yes, a good rule of thumb is to try and submit at least one good post per day. I don’t know how the algorithm works here, but over on the other site, it only feeds one post into the feed of your users if your sub is small.

Maybe you could have a setting where you indicate 2-4 instances you want it to always search. A lot of instances are like mine, just made for one or a few users and aren’t going to host a lot of content.

Thank you for this.

and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,

This is one of the most true statements I’ve read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.

I think it should be generated by participation that is upvoted. If you contribute enough quality stuff, you get one gold to give out. And yeah it should just be gold, and multiple golds would have just one icon, with a number;

Agreed. There is no benefit to the current system, the current behavior for interacting with links on remote instances.

It only leads to confusion and/or a bad user experience.