Sjmarf

Paste the link in the search bar of another instance. If the post is cached, it’ll return it. Ideally, use the link to the post on the author’s instance, rather than the link to the post on another instance.

Technical answer:

Instances store posts from other instances. Every post on the fediverse has a unique ID called the “actor ID”. The actor ID of a post is the URL of the post on the instance of the user that authored the post. On the Lemmy web UI, you can retrieve this by right-clicking on the rainbow star icon below any post and copying the link.

To retrieve the details for a cached post, you can call resolve_object?q=<actor-id>. For example:

https://sh.itjust.works/api/v3/resolve_object?=https%3A%2F%2Flemmings.world%2Fpost%2F41938713

For convenience, the Lemmy UI calls this when you paste a URL in the search bar.

This can work for any URL that points to the post, but you should use the actor ID where possible. The Lemmy backend knows the actor ID of every post it has, but it may not know whichever URL you’re querying with, and you may get a null result when the post is cached.

I hope this helps.

The Lemmy UI doesn’t allow you to see others’ private messages, no, but you shouldn’t consider them to be private. It’s possible for instance admins to read them, and in the past there’s been exploits allowing anyone to read them. If you need more secure messaging, use Matrix instead.

You can read up on the conversation on the GitHub issue here.

TL;DR: the current system on the (unreleased) 1.0 codebase is that your Lemmy instance will replace all Lemmy URLs in posts/comments with the equivalent URLs on your own instance. In the issue I linked, some concerns are raised about this system and various other options are discussed. It’s possible that the way it works will change before Lemmy 1.0 is released.

Lemmy doesn’t support this natively, but many clients do. Off the top of my head:

• Tesseract (desktop)
• Voyager (web frontend designed for mobile. I believe you need to install the app rather than using the website to use keyword filters)
• Mlem (iOS)
• Arctic (iOS)
• Thunder (Android & iOS)
• Sync (Android; I’ve heard Sync is unmaintained though)

Assuming you’re on desktop, Tesseract is probably your best bet. It might also be possible to get Voyager working. Some instances (like sh.itjust.works) run their own Tesseract instances (https://tesh.itjust.works/), but lemm.ee doesn’t. You’d have to use some other Tesseract instance, specifically one that allows connecting to any Lemmy instance (https://tesh.itjust.works/ is for sh.itjust.works accounts only). E.g. https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

Here’s the relevant issue on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4340

Same problem for me on Safari iOS. The username input box is behind the logo, but I can’t click on it without clicking on the logo. Will try on my desktop when I get home