Now that we're on Lemmy, the different categories aren't called "subreddits" anymore. What are they called now? Communities? And is there a way to link them like we used to with an r/ ?
Welcome! Just FYI, these questions are usually answerable in the sub Lemmy_Support over at lemmy.ml.
Communities are called communities, there hasn't been really any push to rename them anything different.
You do have links, it's /c/ for us, but you're on the fediverse now so be care full with links. Not everyone is going to use the same host to access Lemmy, for example you're on lemmy.world and I'm on my own hosted one, so that /c/ link may fail for me as my instance may not be subscribed yet. (Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it).
The safer way to link communities is using the !____@_____ notation, similar to email addresses. So for the support community it'd be !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml - which all instances know how to link to that.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing that should be hidden behind the UI. I’ve been on the internet long enough that I remember when we had to use a similar approach for addressing emails - where you essentially had to put routing information into your address field, rather than letting the servers figure it out.
Apollo, for instance, had a feature like autocomplete for /r links. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.
The fragmentation of similar/identically oriented communities is a strength in some ways but at the same time presents a fragmented user experience. While I recognize the challenges on the server side if there’s not an aggregator, I think the client should be able to allow users to designate what would essentially be a multireddit consisting of all of the news.whatever communities, and offer further aggregation that the seven different posts linking to the same article into a single post. There’s a few different ways replies could be handled, but that’s the general idea.
We want to make sure we keep the strengths of federation while hiding things like duplication from users.
Sync does a good job at this, the best of any clients as long as it's in the ! notation. There are definitely several issues over on the Lemmy github asking to clean up the webui though for all the reasons you're calling out.
but it won't auto make a hotlink, and that's local only to your instance. To make a community link you have to use the !@ syntax, like !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
The safer way to link communities is using the !_@__ notation, similar to email addresses. So for the support community it'd be !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml - which all instances know how to link to that.