I used this as an excuse to start a community, just so I could try to reproduce your problem. But, it actually worked for me on the first try, simply by using a single word without any special characters. Similar to your “pens” attempt. FWIW the only other field I filled in was the Display Name, for which I used the same word but starting with a capital letter. For Languages, I selected English.

There’s also https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

!aww@lemmy.ml exists!

Those seem to be the closest thing to it for now indeed, thanks.

I’d love to have an equivalent to r/Composting.