Lemmy 0.18 broke direct connection to the Lemmy API from web clients with a very strange merge request two weeks ago. I have no idea what the motive was for this to be merged. Suffice it to say, it's been the source of a ton of headache today. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3191

Luckily, there is a new PR to fix web clients not being able to connect to lemmy instances here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3421

If you have a github account, please "thumbs up" this PR. DO NOT COMMENT, that just spams the devs

Thanks! :)