Links to other instances always say I'm logged out (which, technically, I am) that makes the link useless.
For example, I am logged in at my home instance of https://midwest.social
If I click a link to go to https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support it takes me to that community, but I am not logged in (to lemmy.ml) so I am unable to meaningfully interact with it. I have to manually edit each lemmy URL that I go to in the URL bar in order for me to go to that community with my lemmy account.
I've been a system administrator for 20 years, and this took me a few minutes to figure out. "Casual" users are just going to be SOL since they aren't going to be analyzing editing URLs to make them work. I feel like the only want to fix this is to have a browser addon intercept any lemmy URLs and modify them to work based on your home instance.
Am I doing something wrong, or is this just how it is?
exactly this! unfortunately it's a bit cumbersome, but it's the best way to do it currently.
it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to write an extension that will handle lemmy links for you, not sure if the lemmy devs have this as something on their todo list (handling it all from within lemmy i mean).
No, it's required. To me your link points to nonexistent /c/main on my instance. It looks redundant when you're viewing in the same instance, but people from other instances need it: You want me to see https://suppo.fi/c/main@midwest.social, and not https://suppo.fi/c/main.
A nice solution is a domain which only job is to translate everything to the right instance (most popular). Like lemmyweb.xyz lemmyweb.org lemmyweb.etc (many domains owned by different ONG with the same "script" so there is no one single point of failure). The first time you login to this domain you select your user / pass and instance. And then it's all automatic.
I don't know if what I'm saying has any sense.