You should also be able to use the search bar
In short, to use communities created on other instances, you will go to lemmy.world/c/COMMUNITY
So to access the Canada community that’s located on lemmy.ca, you go to lemmy.world/c/canada@lemmy.ca
The exclamation mark thing is a common link format that tells your app or the Lemmy websites that you are linking to a community somewhere. Using the search bar within lemmy.world should also do the same thing
This visual guide might help
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/detailed-overview













There’s a small learning process, but ultimately it isn’t that different. I think part of the difficulty is that the lack of a nice onboarding, which is what these guide pages are intended for
I’d also recommend these pages
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/mobile-apps