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 becau

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)