Confirmed! I’ve seen that error as well. It seems there might be something wrong with the URL that the backend has issues with. You might want to file a bug over on GitHub.

I’ve seen the same behavior with external links to user comments.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/524912

If an instance has not yet discovered a community on another instance, you have to use the search function to find it. I just did a search for "![email protected]" it showed up, and I clicked on the link. Now lemmy.ml knows about this community and the original link won't 404.

It would be cool if we got a more useful message instead of a 404 though.

I'm on lemmy.world and I had a 404 a few times just by loading the home page. It's the server bugging out probably.