Follow and comment are the only things that are supported across platforms. That is what I mean by "exchanging at a basic level". To use any of the various feat

Follow and comment are the only things that are supported across platforms. That is what I mean by "exchanging at a basic level". To use any of the various features that makes the various applications worthwhile, you have to go create an account in that application and subscribe to people's accounts from there. When Gitea implements federated merge requests and tickets, you will be able to follow repositories from Mastodon and comment on issues from there. That's great! But to do anything else (create/assign/close issues, open/review merge requests, ...) you will have to create a separate Gitea account and use it to interact with Gitea users. This is a serious limit to "interacting with a whole diverse universe".