Solution
The Lemmy server appears to have a database limit of 255 characters [2]; however, individual instances appear to put their own limits on username length though the frontend [3] and/or the API [4.1][4.2].
Original Post
If you know, please also provide relevant documentation.
UPDATE (2025-02-02T06:06Z): I did some brute-force testing, and, at least for sh.itjust.works, it seems that the maximum username length is 50, and the maximum password length is 60 [1].
References
- “Sign Up”. sh.itjust.works. Lemmy. Accessed: 2025-02-02T08:49Z. https://sh.itjust.works/signup.
- When creating an account on sh.itjust.works, the sign-up form will throw this error if the provided password is greater than 60 characters in length.
- @[email protected] To: [“[SOLVED] What is the maximum username length for a Lemmy account?”. “Kalcifer” @[email protected]. “Lemmy Support” [email protected]. sh.itjust.works. Lemmy. Published: 2025-02-03T00:54:51Z. https://sh.itjust.works/post/32085936.]. Published: 2025-02-02T05:57:26Z. Accessed: 2025-02-03T00:44Z. https://sh.itjust.works/post/32085936/16442382.
- They pointed to code on GitHub for the Lemmy server which outlines the length of the username data in the SQL database.
- “[SOLVED] What is the maximum username length for a Lemmy account?”. “Kalcifer” @[email protected]. “Lemmy Support” [email protected]. sh.itjust.works. Lemmy. Published: 2025-02-03T00:54:51Z. Accessed: 2025-02-03T00:46Z. https://sh.itjust.works/post/32085936.
- §“Original Post”. ¶2.
[…] I did some brute-force testing, and, at least for sh.itjust.works, it seems that the maximum username length is 50 […]
- The maximum username length for sh.itjust.works was found to be 50 characters by brute-force testing the length limit.
- §“Original Post”. ¶2.
- “Andrew” @[email protected] To [“[SOLVED] What is the maximum username length for a Lemmy account?”. “Kalcifer” @[email protected]. “Lemmy Support” [email protected]. sh.itjust.works. Lemmy. Published: 2025-02-03T00:54:51Z. https://sh.itjust.works/post/32085936.] Published: 2025-02-02T19:57:49Z. Accessed: 2025-02-03T00:59Z. https://sh.itjust.works/post/32085936/16453656.
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curl -L http://lemmy.world/api/v3/site | jq -r .site_view.local_site.actor_name_max_length(26)- The maximum username length for Lemmy.world was found to be 26 characters via an API request.
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curl -L http://sh.itjust.works/api/v3/site | jq -r .site_view.local_site.actor_name_max_length(50)- The maximum username length for sh.itjust.works was found to be 50 characters via an API request.
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Did you perhaps not see that I cited your comment’s findings as a source for the solution…? Or is it that you can’t believe that I would dare to exhibit any amount of skepticism of your claim?
I saw your edit, yeah. I’m not some precious person who thinks no-one should dare question their claims. To my mind, though, what I said wasn’t a claim. A claim would be if I’d said “lemmy.world is 26, sh.itjustworks is 50” with no further info. Instead, I gave command-line instructions for you to run yourself, so you could get the answers for those instances (and any other instances) from Lemmy’s backend itself. If I wasn’t reasonably sure that the backend was giving you the numbers you were looking for, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
I wasn’t reacting to being questioned, though, I was reacting to being singled-out for being questioned. You marked this as “Solved” based - also - on a test from you, and an answer from TootSweet, but it didn’t look like to me that you ever questioned whether those answers deserved a follow-up. Neither of those, in my opinion, are really good enough, but I’ll say why in the answers to your individual comments about them.
This isn’t to discredit how you have internalized the exchange, so I apologize if I made you feel this way, but I want to assure you that it wasn’t my intent to single you out. I was simply looking for clarification because I felt that I might’ve found a potential ambiguity that I personally wasn’t sure of.
Eh, this is becoming rather pedantic, imo. I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.
I made one arsey comment, and you replied to it 9 times. It was only ever going to get pedantic. It’s too late to complain about it now.
I personally try to keep my responses atomic to the topic.
I’m not complaining, I just didn’t understand what the point was that you were trying to make.
Then what is it about me using your comment as a source makes you think that I viewed your response as “not good enough”?
Nothing. It wasn’t about the edit.
I’ve said elsewhere that I thought your second follow-up question was disingenuous, so I’ll expand on that here. That’s the thing that annoyed me. Not because I think no-one should question me, or because no-one should inquire further, but because the more questions you want to ask about a particular thing, the more informed those questions need to be. Otherwise it just gets tedious, explaining why irrelevant things are irrelevant. User display names aren’t relevant to an API’s ‘/site’ response; ActivityPub isn’t relevant at all, and ‘name’ is such a generic, widely-used word, that reaching for it as evidence that I might be confused is such a stretch, I don’t know why you’d go for it. It made me question your motive, given that the likelihood of you being correct - after fishing a word out from something you don’t seem that experienced with - is so low. It stops reading as a well-intentioned question, and starts reading as scepticism for scepticism’s sake.
I suspect this statement is the source of all of this. When I sent this comment, I wasn’t trying to do some “gotcha”. I thought we were, in a sense, investigating together through documentation to try an find the right answer to the question. From my perspective, you provided an idea of what it could be, and I was trying to work with you to narrow down if that was for sure what we were looking for by providing some documentation that I came across. I wasn’t trying to insult your intelligence, or belittle you or your help. I simply thought we were brainstorming together.