Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @[email protected] (because they are so cool they run their own instance).

You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow.

Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.

You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all.

I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.

If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).

I was replying in context to the comment above about typing in the handle, and I would put copy/paste in the same category.

With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that come into existence now honestly.

Is this something that is just crappy with the workflow, so other clients could be better or a limitation of the current mastadon server implementation not providing enough information?

Not sure what you mean, I think that is a valid point.

I don't use mastadon, so learning that the idea it doesn't have a registered "follow" scheme is not great.