The links like [email protected].
I have had a pretty bad time making those work. I have tried searching for them at the communities page, and removing the exclamation mark and pasting them on my instance (lemmy.world/c/[email protected]).
Some times one of those works, other times my instance finds nothing. And if I go directly to the home instance of the community, it doesn’t bring my login.
What is the recommended way to use those?
Yes, but links on lemmy.world will work for me. (Your link doesn’t exactly work, but that’s only because the lemmy.world is duplicated.)
Is that the expected way to use the names? Should I expect communities from other instances to work the same way?
I edited the link I posted myself as code because when posting an FQDN (fully qualified domain name) Lemmy may do a relative transform, at least that’s what rc.4 is doing. Names starting with a ! are internal Lemmy shortcuts to save users the trouble of typing out the FQDN and dealing with relative versus absolute. They’re not working right everywhere yet, but they should be on the next official version release.