One of the things that still confounds me about the Mastodon web client. I think it happens when:

a post from an account I follow has links in it to other instances but that post is not yet federated to my instance, and I click its links, and…

I end up on the other instance, which of course I’m not logged in to, so if I try to follow that account or interact with it in anyway, I have to jump through the instance to instance gateway.

I *think* this is what’s going on