I cannot put into words how profoundly stupid this “feature” is. AOL and Geocities pages were genuinely more user friendly. Whoever added it, refreshed the page and said “yeah, this works well” and left it in should be fired! …out of a cannon and into the Sun!
If you’re not ready to make your own instance, can use an under-the-radar instance like ours at Lemmy.pro and you’ll avoid the issue