Mastodon

Yes, which makes the system harder to use, ergo all the comments from normies. There are obvious advantages to federation, but I wish people stopped pretending there aren't any trade-offs.

Honestly, it could be a UX solution, that doesn't need a fundamental change in federation. I can already post as myself to lemmy.ml, even though my account isn't there. So a solution that transparently does exactly that, but while I'm browsing the lemmy.ml instance should be possible. Somewhat similar to how following people on Mastodon on different instances opens a popup for login, then follows them. Honestly, even just an easier/automated way to map from to would help. Currently, it's all instance specific IDs. If posts/comments/etc had a similarly global ID system as communities there'd be a lot less problems. Visiting that post would simply mean replacing the host part of the URL, something a browser plugin could take care of.