I think they’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username (username@instance.com) and put it in the search bar and it’ll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you’re looking at someone’s profile.

And if you want to discover new people where you don’t already know their username, then I believe that is the same as any other social media as well, you can come across them in the comments of people you follow or go to the discover tab or search hashtags and you’ll find new people that you can tap on and follow.

I feel like this basically covers how you would find people. A lot of people get hung up on how you know what instance other people are on but it doesn’t usually matter. Either someone will give you their username which includes @instance.com, or if you don’t know the instance you can search for their name and all known accounts with that name will show up.

For example if I just search my username “BakedCatboy” (not my real username), the search results show both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.