It looks like it was done as a relative link, like this: [/c/answered](/c/answered@mander.xyz).

It’s possible to look at the source of a Lemmy post by clicking on the 3 dots in the toolbar that is under the poster and community but above the post’s contents, and then clicking the “view source” button.

I think that’s still a valid reason for banning even if it’s not explicitly in the rules. If wolfballs were federated with lemmy.ml, the user’s main account would certainly be banned from this instance, and setting up another account on lemmy.ml would be seen as ban evasion, causing the new account to also be banned. So it makes no sense to not ban their account just because lemmy.ml blocks wolfballs and thus had no opportunity to ban their main account; in fact it makes negative sense because now we’re letting someone use our instance because their behavior was so unacceptable that we blocked their instance.

It might be that you’re on a smaller/newer instance, so your instance doesn’t know about many of the communities you’re not subscribed to.

You don’t have to — you can click “create post” at the top of the screen (if you’re using the web client at least) and select the community you want to post in. I agree that it’s pretty unintuitive that the “create a post” button only shows up under a community after you subscribe to that community though.

It would also be possible to write blog entries elsewhere and just post links to them on Lemmy.

Thanks @humanetech@mastodon.social for boosting a toot that announced this!