You won't get a 404 if you're using the webapp, or on most mobile apps. For instance, I'm on Voyager and the subreddit link works fine upon clicking. No need to copy and paste it to the search.
Oh boy lol. Lemmys growing pains. Perhaps it's because you're using kbin? I don't know, but I can confirm that the link I posted works great on Lemmy web and some android apps with proper link handling.
Thanks! Kind of annoying that this is required just now, either there's an easier way that I'm just too dumb to see - or I imagine this process will be made easier in future (hopefully near) :D
I imagine some sort of autocomplete feature could be made which provides a dropdown menu of communities and instances based on what you type after "/c/".
It exists! It gets triggered when you start typing exclamation mark followed by a few characters. A long popup list appeared with communities your home instant knows of.
And this is with the stock web ui. If you're using an app then it's up to the developer of that app.
/c/ (and kbin's /m/) is an implementation detail, the "real" community names all start with !
well, technically they're just fancy user accounts which means they start with @, but that's even more obscure an implementation detail, especially with lemmy allowing both a user and community to have the same name