You have to escape the dash, otherwise it becomes a bullet point.

If you format the link as !community@instance.tld it will be a clickable link (in this case it would be !geocaching@lemmy.world).

Or just go to https://lemmyverse.net/

This is a great list of communities! Nice to see that !illegallysmolbirbs@mander.xyz made it on here.

It’s not mine, but I think the purple look comes from color grading more than white balance (this is definitely not just a raw photo straight out of the camera). I actually like the purple look to it (I think it makes it look kind of interesting, almost like the coloring of a painting, and others do too), but it is completely subjective, so I see why you might not like it as much.

I haven’t used Stack Overflow in a while so I forgot about most of those features, and as long as it also uses ActivityPub it doesn’t really matter that much if it is a different platform. I think some of those features could even be useful on Lemmy (tagging posts would be nice and maybe community-editable posts could be a thing that communities could choose to enable).

Lemmy could be that, just have programming (and other) Q&A communities here.