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Expanded?
No. You literally just type the name of the community. Plaintext. No extra steps of any kind.
Look at that first community mention you wrote, it turned into a link.
Both the webUI and basically every client will then make it clickable in a suitable way for each user on whatever instance. The post itself is still just plaintext, the lemmy server doesn't change anything to add a link, the clients do.
If you use a hyperlink, or let the webUI autocomplete it into a hyperlink (which is what I think you mean by, "expanding" it), it wont be a relative link anymore. It's then a "normal" markdown hyperlink. Which technically wont work right as-is unless you edit it to be relative, which breaks in other situations.
Using relative markdown links was always a stopgap, and is no longer necessary.
But then absolute links are being fixed, as many clients will now open absolute links, as if they were relative.
Except then you have to know the proper community name, which can often look very different from what is displayed. e.g. !world@lemmy.world is an entirely different community than !worldnews@lemmy.world, and damn, that example did not work bc both end up as "valid" links. Well, theoretically sometimes the feedback on having gotten the name correct could be helpful I suppose.
Also I note that what you are saying can seem in contradiction with the help docs. If you start a post or reply and click the help icon in the web UI, it will go to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html, which does not mention the word "community" at all, but does show link syntax. I am more inclined to believe you than the help docs! Especially when we can see the resulting behavior in front of our very eyes - except where it may pertain to other methods of access - but I am pointing out here again that for a new user, finding out such things is currently a terrible process! Even Arch Linux has at the very least man pages, as well as the wikis!
But I've been on the Fediverse since the Rexodus, and since I don't use apps other than the webpage UI (I tried Voyager but while it looks nice, it doesn't seem to function well, maybe that pertains to accounts on instances other than Lemmy.world such as mine - e.g. I would reply to someone but no amount of refreshing or clicking around would let me see my reply until I force-quit and restarted the app), Mbin, PieFed or Sublinks (or Tesseract), I don't know myself what the "preferred" method of linking is. I just see what works (or not) for me. And again the help docs are of no help here.
So since you are saying that this 11-month old post is outdated, if you know the details of what would be better practice, perhaps you can write a newer post explaining that?
The webUIs feature to autocomplete links pre-dates the new way of doing it.
It has not been removed, or changed to autocomplete to plaintext for some reason.
No other client does it, afaik.