Links to other instances always say I'm logged out (which, technically, I am) that makes the link useless.
For example, I am logged in at my home instance of https://midwest.social
If I click a link to go to https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support it takes me to that community, but I am not logged in (to lemmy.ml) so I am unable to meaningfully interact with it. I have to manually edit each lemmy URL that I go to in the URL bar in order for me to go to that community with my lemmy account.
So I need to manually change
https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support into https://midwest.social/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml and I have to do this each time I click a link to another instance if I want to post there.
I've been a system administrator for 20 years, and this took me a few minutes to figure out. "Casual" users are just going to be SOL since they aren't going to be analyzing editing URLs to make them work. I feel like the only want to fix this is to have a browser addon intercept any lemmy URLs and modify them to work based on your home instance.
Am I doing something wrong, or is this just how it is?
Copy and paste the link into midwest socials search box and it does the work for you
exactly this! unfortunately it's a bit cumbersome, but it's the best way to do it currently.
it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to write an extension that will handle lemmy links for you, not sure if the lemmy devs have this as something on their todo list (handling it all from within lemmy i mean).