The answer is: it'll happen automatically. Just search for someone's handle, and your server will talk to that other server. When you follow that other users, your server will start federating with that other servers.

Note though that servers might block each other. For example, many Western servers block Japanese pawoo.net, since it allows posting lolicon. Western servers don't want this content in their timelines and caches, so they block it. If your server blocks another.social, you won't be able to follow anyone on there.

But your question also hints at a real problem with Fediverse (of which Mastodon is a part), which is: each instance only sees a subset of the Fediverse. Thus, searching by hashtag will only get you a subset of all posts that contain it. Full-text search is even more complicated.

Four data points ain't a lot, but you can no longer claim it's a one-off event either.

I picked SHA-1 because it was the simplest way to generate pseudorandom data: I knew there's a Rust crate for it which I used before. Works fine for a proof-of-concept :) I'm now reading up on other hashes and ciphers. My tentative plan was to replace SHA-1 with AES-NI in counter mode, but if I can find something that works on all CPUs while giving me a comparable performance, I'll go for that. (Should probably look at PRNGs as well; if I concatenate the file seed with the counter and use that as a seed for a PRNG, then ask it for a value -- it should be good enough too.)

I doubt Lars has requirements for the quality of randomness, but we'll see.

If Amazon doesn't fit, try other partners. We have businesses here that will do the shopping for you, and deliver everything to the door; and I'm not even in the USA. Perhaps integrating with those is a better idea than Amazon. Individual transactions will still be small, of course, but hopefully you'll get more of them, increasing profits.

Best of luck with your next idea, and consider not giving up on this one either. It's obviously valuable to people, but it might take a few years to grow to a level where it makes sense to dedicate more effort to it.

I also want to express my gratitude for a different view of startups — I definitely never thought of them as a bunch of guys who would take as much open source software as possible but hide the fact, all in a name of perceived smartness, innovativeness and productivity.

I don't know how to explain that without analogies to Haskell (which, I presume, author deliberately avoids), though.