Bit of both. I don’t think they were trying to link the communities; just making clear what instance they were on. I think the correct nomenclature would be to put ! in front of them, like !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone

(But when I clicked “link a community” in Voyager like I did just now, it both added the ! and then formatted a link directly to blahaj in standard brackets+parentheses so tbh idk)