Comment by TekMol

The mechanism is not friendly or intuitive but:

1. On your own instance ...

2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...

3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".

4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...

5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.

If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.

Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.

Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.

(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)

There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct

The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.

> I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance.

It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.

I hope this will be made easier in the near future. In the meantime, you can use this browser extension: https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct#installation

It's a valid criticism. There's many browser extensions that "fix" this.

Many servers have a link that let's you sign in when you click the follow button. it's a bit janker than ideal.

Which instance are you on? Mastodon is decentralized, there may be servers that are overloaded whereas other are fast. Like email.

I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).

It's not one app, it's many servers, individually hosted. The one paulg chose appears to be slower than, say, the one I'm using:

https://mas.to/@paulg

https://mastodon.social/@terretta

There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals, give them time or run your own instance and federate

There are many Mastodon providers, just like there are many email providers.

How fast it is depends on the provider you use.

For some reason the link here points to the slowest Mastodon instance in the world. From the one I use (indieweb) it's quite fast:

https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to

Mastodon servers are self-hosted by various groups or individuals so they aren't designed to be as scalable as Twitter. Today's events caused a large influx to pretty much every prominent server. A few ones I follow have announced they are either going down for maintenance or upgrading their servers already.

Mastodon is getting slammed by the twitter exodus, this is the first time it's being truly tested.

Depends on the instance. I have signed up in hachyderm.io and its okay

It's usually pretty fast for me, but I am also experiencing quite a bit of lag at the moment.

Says the one using HNews which looks like it's from the 90's lol

You can try another server! https://toot.community/@paulg@mas.to

That's advantage of federation!