Hmmm, would've been useful if I could see those as a 'grouped' timeline to get an impression of the posted content and follow people with content you like. (As opposed to clicking on hundreds of links individually)
It would even be more useful if you could have a dynamically rendered timeline of multiple people with a single URL (sort of like a multireddit).
As somebody who has followed exactly one person before seeing these links, I appreciate the list. But wow, is there no better way to follow than a three click operation?
This site could ask you to sign in with your home instance first, then Follow would be a single click operation as it could call the appropriate API call on your home instance. (It could even show you which ones you already follow in that case.) It would require quite a bit more code though to get the OAuth flow in place.
As far as custom issue trackers go, this one isn't too bad. You could suggest an improvement. If you know perl, you could even write your own extension to provide this functionality.
That's only the flow if you click "follow" when you're looking at a profile on a third party server. If you come across that same profile in your server's federated timeline, it's a one click operation.
Paste link/username into the search box above the new toot box, hit return, the user will appear in the UI of your home server, hit the ‘follow’ button, done.
Probably about the same number of clicks, admittedly, but it may feel faster.
Already found Drew here: https://cmpwn.com/@sir