The links like !NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world.
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/NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world).
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?
You want to go to the search bar at the top and search NoStupidQuestions then limit to communities/local, at least for communities on your instance.
You can also search !NoStupidQuestions from there and it should work, but you have to give it a second to show the search results. A weird, silly issue is that if you try to search from the communities page, it automatically narrows your search to communities, and for whatever reason that doesn’t recognize the !NoStupidQuestions style nor urls from what I’ve found.
You have to switch the search settings to search all for it to recognize either of those styles.
I’m interested on how I search for specific communities in other instances.
I guess my question could have been more clear on that.
Similar idea as what I wrote, but instead of limiting to communities/local, you leave both as All when using the search bar at the top. For specific remote communities, if someone on your instance has searched for them before, then you may just need to search as community@remote.tld, for example: asklemmy@lemmy.ml.
If someone on your instance hasn’t searched for the community yet, then you would need to copy the url for the community into the search (with it set to all both in type and scope) and do it that way, for example: https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy
Unfortunately, to know of these at all, you typically have to go to the remote instance itself and look through the communities there are on their community page, or someone from a remote instance has to post to a community in your instance telling you about them. Otherwise unless someone else in your instance has done so & subscribed to them, I don’t think they’ll show up in the all feed of your instance.
I may be mistaken on this last part, but that’s how the community connections work to the best of my understanding.