The only problem is that if your instance doesn't know about that community yet, it'll just 404, you still have to search for it first because visiting the link doesn't make your instance fetch the community yet.

This should still be the default behavior when it autofills a community link though, I hope they make this change 👍

This does not work on Jerboa. In fact most instance/user/community link in Jerboa are just completely broken.

The devs have said they'd like to make this happen more automatically, but until then this is a great tip!

Sorry OP, but your links don't work for me. Reading this on kbin and all your links are 404'ing.

https://i.imgur.com/sQD9oxk.png

There are an irksome number of ways to express a community:

• !lemmy@lemmy.ml
• https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy
• /c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
• Is that all of them?

The one that gets advertised in the sidebar is !lemmy@lemmy.ml. I'd love to see a canonical format established that has a superset of the useful behaviors of the non-canonical representations.

Edit: Most of those don't get hotlinked automatically. Does a bang-prefixed link do anything useful (no it doesn't)? And you pointed out c-prefixed does get hotlinked and work.

Edit2: As commenters below note, the behavior varies between web-ui and jerboa. 🤮

That is a really cool observation! It always bothered me that I couldn't post after following a link/having to paste to search first.

This is a great feature! I wish this could work in the url field too, as I tried that, but it doesn't take that much time to open the body of a post, so it's not really a major issue to worry about though

Ahaa! effect. Yes of course, as URL handling within the browser will inset your domain automatically. (edit for clarity: web browsers assume a link with a missing domain to go to the same domain/IP as the page the link is on, that's W3C standard -- therefore facepalm).
So, there is a bug in that link-builder popup which comes up as i start to type a !community@instance.tld link, right? It should not create links to the domains directly.

edit: Unfortunately, links to federated posts and comments are still broken because posts synced to other instances get a different ID than the original. Same as with users, there is no unique post ID throughout the federation (no common namespace). Systemic error but probably simple to fix.

Going trough my old comments now. Shouldn't be that much.

Ok so linking communities and usernames works reliably for me on the web this way:

News - [News](/c/news@beehaw.org)
PriorProject - [PriorProject](/u/PriorProject@lemmy.world)

But how do I universally link a post or comment? The comment ids are different across instances! This comment by @PriorProject@lemmy.world for example has a canonical URL (colored pentagram icon):

https://lemmy.world/comment/18453

And the link to it on my instance (chainlink icon):

https://mander.xyz/comment/240478

None of these work:

comment - [comment](/comment/18453@lemmy.world) - 404
comment - [comment](/comment/18453) - wrong comment for me comment - [comment](/comment/240478) - works for me but not you
comment - [comment](https://lemmy.world/comment/18453) - works but cannot reply since not logged in