So I went ahead and created an account on a mastodon instance and copied the url of this post and put it in the search box and found the post on mastodon.
However when I sent a reply nothing seems to have come across is there something I'm missing here? is this not what I'm supposed to use? I've seen that this does work but I've searched and no one actually seems to have documented how it works, or if they did I'm missing it.