You may be new to Lemmy and wondering what it’s all about.

Prefer a video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xCw9zb5kw

Lemmy is part of the Fediverse, a network of interconnected social media platforms. Lemmy is intended to work like Reddit, but instead of one central site, there is no central site. Instead, there are many different sites (nodes) that talk to each other.

Think of this like email. No one “owns” email. Instead, there are many email servers. Some are large, like Gmail. Some are smaller, like the email server that runs email at your work. And some people run their own email server, just for themselves.

Even though there are many different sites providing email, it does not matter which one you pick. For the most part, any email provider you choose can email any other.

Federated sites work the same way. Lemmy.nz is one site, Lemmy.ml is another. Beehaw.org is yet another. There are many different Lemmy sites, large and small. All these sites have their own users, they have their own communities (subreddits), and they all connect to each other. If you want to view posts on asklemmy on Lemmy.ml, you can subscribe. It doesn’t matter which server you signed up to. You can comment on posts, upvote posts, the whole shebang. Regardless of which server you signed up to, you can seamlessly interact with posts, comments, and upvotes across the entire network.

Hopefully this answers more questions than it raises, but really it could go either way. Reply to this post if you have questions (regardless of which server you signed up to).

  • Fizz
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    1 year ago

    This is confusing to me. So if I created my account on this instance and I want to see posts and comment on posts from Beehaw.org. Do I need to create a different account on that instance? If so how do I link it all together?

    Edit: I figured it out. This was a great video that explained it in 5mins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6xCw9zb5kw

    • DaveOPMA
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for posting this! I’ll add the video in some places for people that prefer video.

      For others: the answer is no you don’t need another account, you can subscribe to beehaw communities from lemmy.nz, and can find these in the Communities page, you just need to click the “All” tab.

  • quirq
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    1 year ago

    Seeing as this is about Lemmy specifically - has anyone tried out Mlem for iOS? Lemmy client app (https://github.com/buresdv/Mlem)

    You can install it via TestFlight from that link.

    Looks really nice for iOS, but personally couldn’t get it to log me in to lemmy.nz - Thought I’d see if anyone else has tried to get it working!

    • DaveOPMA
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      1 year ago

      Sorry I don’t use iOS, but in theory it should be no different than any other instance. Hopefully someone else can comment on their success ( or lack of).

      But was there an error message? Did you write the server in full (i.e. https://lemmy.nz) or did you just write “lemmy.nz”? Whichever you tried, maybe try the other?

      • quirq
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        1 year ago

        I’m thinking it might be an iOS thing now - I can’t even login via a web browser on my phone :P

        But yeah I tried all of the combinations.

        Looks like they’ve had issues with lemmy-ui before based on the GitHub issues. I will await fixes and just comment/post while on Windows :D

        • DaveOPMA
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          1 year ago

          The web frontend uses websockets to connect to the API, which can fail to connect. If that happens, the page will load but things like logging in won’t work.

          I’m not sure why that would affect an app though, which calls the API itself. Unless the API itself wasn’t working, but it is because it works for everyone else!

          It’s a shame no one else has responded, it would be good to know if it’s a problem only for you, or for others as well.

    • bevan
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      1 year ago

      Definitely works for me, not many features yet but can read and post at least.

      • quirq
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for the reply!

        I have found my issue - it seems that having a really long password (64 char) just won’t work. I remember seeing an issue with Beehaw.org and long passwords, so I thought I would try it out.

        Seems it has fixed it for both just the lemmy-ui frontend AND the app.

        Well it could either be the long password or a specific symbol, haven’t tested that far. In any case a 20 char password has allowed me to login to both Mlem and just lemmy.nz on Safari :)

        I’m happy with that for now!

        (This post is feeling like a long run-on sentence hahah) I also found out that 60 chars is the limit according to Lemmy GitHub issue (https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa/issues/425)

        The world is not over, carry on everyone :P

        • bevan
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          1 year ago

          Ah ha! and I thought my 25 character password was excessive!

          • quirq
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            1 year ago

            Gotta love password managers taking the hassle out of the long passwords these days :D

        • DaveOPMA
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          1 year ago

          Well done working it out! It’s giving me flashbacks to legacy systems from a couple of decades ago that had 12 or 16 character password limits. I think hotmail was one of them. But they didn’t tell you, they just cut it off behind the scenes so you didn’t know most of your password wasn’t being used!

          • quirq
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            1 year ago

            Yeah it was a bit of trial and error getting to the solution! Wasn’t helped by the fact that I use a password manager that obviously pastes the password in - and they said in a GitHub issue that the Lemmy-ui front end truncates anything after the 60 characters, so wouldn’t have seen the issue as I wasn never typing the password in!