It can be seamless. Unfortunately neither lemmy nor kbin translate links that would take you off-instance into links that don’t. So we have to link things correctly manually.

Some links will take you outside your instance, and show you content directly on the home instance of that content, this is what’s happening when you “stop being logged in”. The fediverse rainbow icon also does this, its a button for going to the “original” of any given comment or post. But as you noticed, this means your account wont work.

Some users don’t yet know how to correctly link things so they open from the “local instance”, meaning the link directs your instance to look at the content from another instance, rather than go to that instance directly. Doing this keeps you on your instance, letting you interact with that content using your account.

The way to do this is with relative links, like this one that leads to the Reddit migration kbin page, but inside your lemmy instance. That link will work for others on other instances, too. It will open that kbin page, but never take a user “outside” their instance. Seamless.

Relative links only work if your instance already knows about what it’s linking to, tho. In those cases the search method has to be used. Also lemmy relative links do not work on kbin, and vice versa.

Accessing the content of other lemmy instances using the search method, is fairly simple, you use the !name@instan.ce format, which you post into search on your home instance, this triggers your server actually connecting to the outside instance to go get that content since it hasn’t already.

This method does not work for kbin magazines. Instead of the !name@instan.ce text, you need to paste the full kbin magazine url into search, to get the same thing.

So when a link takes you somewhere you aren’t logged in, try copying that link into search instead of opening it.