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Back when I tried mastodon a couple years ago, the friction required to interact with users and content from other instances was incredibly annoying to the point of turning me off completely. Favoriting something should not take more than a single click regardless if it's from my instance or not. This doesn't appear to be addressed (was it already addressed in an earlier version?)

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The friction you are describing is when you leave Mastodon's web app and go on the public pages of different servers (that have no way to know who you are because they are separate websites with separate cookies). You do not have to leave Mastodon's web app to interact with users and content from other servers. When you naturally see content or users from other servers in your home feed, on the explore tab, in notifications, and so on, there is no difference in how you interact with them. And if you need to look up something that isn't in the interface, you can use the search bar (you can paste URLs into it, too)

I use fosstodon.org. I don't know what version it has, but I can just click on any post's favourite button (or reply to it or boost it) even if it's from another instance. So I reckon if there was an issue before, it has been fixed or it's not universal to all deployments.

All that stuff works fine. I think what they are talking about is following a user on another instance which is still a little clunky sometimes just because of the inherent nature of the domain where you view their profile and click follow being a different domain to where your account resides. I generally just search for the user and click follow on my instance to avoid the redirection steps.

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