I like Mastodon. But the mess which is cross-server following UI is really terrible. One bandaid for it is a browser extension. There’s a bunch of them. But the extensions have to have permission to modify data on all Internet sites, a potentially scary thing. Extension authors have definitely abused that power in the past. So my rule for this kind of thing now is it has to be open source.
There’s three open source Chrome extensions I found that make following cross-server easier.
- Tootski (GitHub). This is the one I use. It works by adding a button to the awful “following users on Mastodon is a terrible experience” popup. It’s been a little flaky but does seem to work. Also ads a “share any page on Mastodon” button which I don’t need.
- Mastodon Link. Obtrusive UI, so I skipped it.
- Mastodon Profile Redirect. Two-step explicit process involving navigating to a web page at your instance.
Nelson's log 