This was helpful, and I understand it now, thanks! It's just SO clunky though to have to use a different URL to get to the same place depending on what instance you're a member of. I don't understand what the benefit of all this added complication is. I feel like good programming should make it so that when I type !community, whatever instance I'm in should just automatically link me to their version of the URL. Like kbin should know that that needs to go to kbin.social/m/community@whatever.yay without me having to change anything.
And in the meantime... we're going to have different communities for each instance because of how confusing this all is. Who decided that !memes was going to be the default memes community? Won't there be other communities that pop up at !memes and !memes etc? It seems like chaos to me. How do I know which one is the right one?