This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

That doesn’t feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you’re using trigram matching, instead of a binary “does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query”, it should be “if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%.” Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.

Without doing something like that, it’s just…not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.