I just learned that @maffsie has patched the very frustrating situation with how account links are handled in Mastodon 4+
@skaverat kindly pointed me to the patch file: https://commit.pup.cloud/maff/queer.party/src/branch/master/patches/4.0.0_4-revert-captive-links.patch that looks to already be applied to https://queer.party
I am not a programmer and don't have the skills to apply this patch myself to an instance of Mastodon but I would love to hear how it goes if anyone else tries it.