I forgot about how central to the fediverse experience the search box is here. That's true for Mastodon, but also other software that connects here, like Pleroma or Friendica. If you want to follow someone that you found while browsing another server, or want to like or share a post you found, but you found it in a thread you were reading but you're not on your home server, the software tries to guide you through a remote-follow, or remote-like, process which is hugely complicated and error prone. It's much easier to copy paste stuff in the search box of your home server. When you hit enter, it actually loads the profile or post into your home server, where you are logged in, and you can click follow or like as normal.
#FediTips #feditip
Assume you have an account on mastodon.social, and you're logged in there. By clicking around you ended up browsing the mstdn.social server (another connected server) and saw this '@FediTips' account that I quoted below. That's fine, you can read these posts since they're public. But when you want to follow that account you hit the snag that you're not logged in on mstdn.social, a server that doesn't know you're logged in on mastodon.social, so it can't register who wants the follow the account. (Side note, the Friendica software can sometimes recognise login sessions of other servers, but forget about that for the moment).
So what is an easy way of doing this? Or maybe not easy, but less error-prone?
You open up the profile on mstdn.social, e.g. by clicking the name or avatar. The url of the account is now in the address bar of your browser. (I often use the web browser to browse social media, works fine, also on mobile. Especially Mastodon and Twitter work really well with their sites on my phone). Select it and copy the whole address to your clipboard.
Now open mastodon.social. You will still be logged in there. Paste the contents of the clipboard into the search box of the mastodon.social site, the search text will be like 'https://mstdn.social/users/feditips'. So this is in the search box of mastodon.social, not the search box of your browser and not the address bar of your browser. Hit Enter. You'll get the profile as a search result. If mastodon.social didn't know about this account yet, it will have quickly looked it up for you and loaded it. Now you see this account on your home server and you can click Follow as normal.
You don't need to use the url. You could also have entered the account handle '@feditips@mstdn.social' in the search box and hit Enter. The same thing would have happened.
What about a post you want to like or reshare? Sometimes when you load a profile like I said, it seems empty. Your home server (mastodon.social) will only show the posts it knows about, while back on mstdn.social all posts of '@FediTips' are there. That's because the posts only get sent to followers, and if you would be the first to follow a certain account on your home server, no posts are there yet. (Not likely with '@FediTips', because it's a very popular account that many other people were following already, so past posts have already been received).
You can also load a remote post into your home server to interact with it. Mostly that is not needed, but you can paste the url of the post on mstdn.social into the search box of mastodon.social and hit Enter. Now the post loads; if mastodon.social didn't have the post yet, it will quickly load it for you. The url of a post looks like (e.g. for the quoted post): 'https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108199521441536756'.
How to get this url of a post? Further #feditip: on almost all fediverse software the link to the post is hidden behind the date or time of the post. So if it says '2 minutes ago', or there is a precise date and or time, click it and copy that url to your clipboard. This is what you can paste in the search box of your own server.
Clicking on the time or date is also how you can see a post in its original form. Sometimes a post can look different on Mastodon than how the author intended it on their own server. Opening a post by clicking its link allows you to see it on the original server, with the original layout.
And yes, I agree this is all not very intuitive.
Okay, if that's not working for you, try just copying the address of the person you want to follow, then paste it into the search box within Mastodon.When you search for an address, it will bring up a profile you can follow.
This works whether you're logged in with apps or the website.
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