So um. Sorry, I'm sure every new person asks this. But do I have it right that if I open some toots in tabs (and they're not coincidentally on my "home server"), and, upon reading, want to interact with them, then the only way is to copy the URL, go back to my home server, and paste the URL into the search bar? I'm not missing anything?
Apparently so.
Being not a security person or authentication-knower, couldn't they use... (OAuth? or another of these things I've vaguely heard of?)... to let you sign in on one server using your account from another? Even if I had to do this for 20 different servers, *once*, it'd still be a great improvement.
Obviously since they haven't, I'd guess they probably couldn't, but.
There is a github issue about it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19652 and apparently the behavior has been changed as of Mastodon 4.0, which is presumably what @kha had in mind in their earlier reply to me.
Update: I discovered that if you *left-click* on a thing in the timeline, it opens a view of it that's still on the same server, so interaction works. It's only middle click to open a new tab that goes to the originating server. The internet has thoroughly trained me out of ever left clicking anything on a website with infinite scroll.