Yep. I told a friend of mine "the federation just works, its the user interface and apps that need work".
Mastodon is in a really good place nowadays where you don't even notice you're browsing across multiple instances. Lemmy is pretty close, too, as long as people know to use relative links and the instance you're on is pretty well federated already so you don't get too many 404 from trying to open places your instance doesn't know about yet.