@SteveM@blorbo.social its similar to how having an email account with gmail wont let you log into protonmail or vice versa — federation allows the different sites that make up fedi to talk to eachother (hence being able to find and follow the people you mention via search) but you still interact with the network from your home server

the UI for communicating this definitely needs improvement — there’s no reason there can’t be a redirect protocol to make this easier (and to prove it, several people have built just that as browser plugins!)