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I don't think the Follow button should recommend signing in, at least not as the primary action. It's unlikely to be relevant to a user who just opened the page. I hadn't realized the sign in page doesn't have the server name, maybe it's config dependent because I do see more text when I look at the sign in page for other servers.
I think web based protocol handlers would be the simplest way to solve this and they don't require installing any browser plugin or a central portal (or OAuth). There has been discussion of it but not critical mass to solve the problem for the whole network.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679
on Misskey: https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey/issues/9504
There is a lot of resistance to the idea. The browser UX for registering protocols is not particularly intuitive. The protocol should not be named after Mastodon because they are defensive of their trademark, and it wouldn't be accurate since the user identifier could be followed from any ActivityPub compatible software.
If you look at the newer comments on the Mastodon github thread I posted you can see web+ap:// recommended, or apub://
I think there just needs to be enough collective will to make this happen. Likely another project will need to take the lead because Mastodon team has decided the browser UX is too much of a barrier. Maybe glitch-soc can do a proof of concept.