How posting to Lemmy works
Lemmy is a longform destination in Bangers: posts there have a title and a body, the same shape as a blog post rather than a short caption. You share a thought, the team drafts a full post in your voice, you review and approve it, and it goes out to your chosen Lemmy community on schedule.
Lemmy is federated, like Mastodon: your posts land on your home instance and are visible across the wider Lemmy network from there, which is worth knowing if you're deciding whether a piece of content belongs in a Lemmy community versus somewhere more centralized.
What Bangers knows about Lemmy
Lemmy has no hard character limit in Bangers. It follows the longform playbook: a title under 100 characters and a body of 500 to 1,200 words with subheads, written to actually be read, not a short caption padded out.
If a draft heading to Lemmy ever arrives as a shorter plain note instead of a full piece, Bangers still publishes it by splitting the first line off as the title (Lemmy calls this field the post's "name") and posting the rest as the body, the same heuristic it uses for the other longform destinations.
Every Lemmy channel you connect posts to exactly one community, chosen when you set up the connection, not a general profile feed. If you want Bangers posting to more than one community, that's a separate channel connection for each.
Lemmy doesn't support threads. There's no chained-post format for a single submission, so a thread draft is rejected with a clear reason.
Lemmy publishing through Bangers doesn't currently attach images: no generated image, and nothing you upload yourself through Telegram. The post publishes as title and body text only.
Connecting it
Connecting Lemmy takes four fields: your instance URL, your username, your password, and the community to post into.
The instance URL is the Lemmy server your account lives on. Your username and password are your actual Lemmy login. Lemmy uses password login rather than a separate app token, so Bangers logs in fresh with these credentials each time it publishes. The community is the name of the community you want posts to land in, without a leading exclamation mark, for example selfhosted rather than the bang-prefixed form some Lemmy apps display.
Bangers logs in and looks up the community before saving the connection, confirming both the login and the community name are correct.
Because Lemmy has no separate app-token system, changing your account password on the instance directly will break the connection until you update it in Bangers with the new password. That's the tradeoff of Lemmy's simpler login model.
When it fails
Nothing publishes without your approval first. If the actual publish to Lemmy fails afterward (the password changed, the community was renamed or removed, the instance is unreachable), you're notified in Telegram within a minute with the specific reason, and you can retry from there.
Frequently asked questions
Can Bangers post to more than one Lemmy community? Each connected Lemmy channel is tied to one community, chosen when you connect it. To post into a second community, connect a second Lemmy channel with that community's name.
Does Bangers use my real Lemmy password? Yes. Lemmy doesn't offer a separate app-token system the way some other networks do, so Bangers logs in with your actual username and password each time it publishes.
Does Bangers write full posts for Lemmy, or short ones? Full posts. Lemmy is treated as a longform destination: a title under 100 characters and a 500 to 1,200 word body with subheads.