Reddit had been one of the best forums on the Internet discussing various topics such as memes, games, and other forms of Internet media as well as technology and even support forums.
However, because of the recent API changes announced by Reddit, they will be essentially killing all the third party applications. Most of them will be in the mobile space, as Reddit does not have a good Mobile client. A large number of Subreddits have also protested against this move by going private on June 12th for 48 hours, some of them are still dark to this day.
We had discussed the open-source Mastodon and the Fediverse in a great detail in the past, which is an open-source alternative for Twitter. In a similar federated universe fashion, Lemmy is an open-source alternative to the Reddit social media platform, where you can join various forums related to different topics and create one of your own.
And while you can access the Lemmy site from your web browser, it is always nice to have a native Linux client which you can rely on.
Lemoa is a powerful, open-source native Linux client for the Lemmy social media platform. Developed in GTK and Rust, Lemoa provides a variety of features including trending posts, post writing/editing, community browsing, and direct messaging. It’s easily installed via Flatpak from Flathub
Lemoa is a native Linux client for the Lemmy social media platform which is written in GTK and Rust which offers a lot of features which enhances the whole experience of using Lemmy. We will further discuss the features and installation procedure of this application on different Linux distributions as well.
Exploring the Features of Lemoa
Although in the early stages, Lemoa is still packed with a lot of features, some of them are mentioned below:
- List trending posts and view its contents and comments.
- Writing and editing posts are also supported.
- You can also browse a communtiy without having to log into your account.
- Once logged in, you can follow communities (Subreddit equivalent) and upvote/downvote on posts as well.
- Private messages and Inbox is also built-into the application.
- You can search communities and join therm across all the Lemmy instances.
- Lemoa also allows you to send personal message to individuals.
The Simple Steps to Install Lemoa on Linux
Lemoa is available as a Flatpak on Flathub and hence you can install the application on any Linux distribution easily as long as you have set up Flathub on your distribution. Once you are done, simply open a Terminal window and then type the following commands:
flatpak install flathub io.github.lemmygtk.lemoa
Once installed, you can launch the application from your App Grid/Menu of your respective desktop environment.
Getting Started: Account Setup and First Launch
You will have to create a Lemmy account on any of the Federated Lemmy instances. Don’t worry, if you are getting confused because of the large number of instances. Think of them as your e-mail providers, you can have a Microsoft or Yahoo Mail, but you can still send the e-mails to anyone having a Gmail account. Similarly, even if you have an account on one Lemmy instance, you can interact with Subreddits (called communities on Lemmy) and accounts on any other Instance without doing anything extra.
Once you are done, open the Lemoa application and first select the instance on which you have your account and click on the ‘Done’ button.
Now, click on the top right hamburger menu and select the ‘Log In’ option.
Now, just enter your credentials and then you will be logged into your account.
Now, you can browse communities, upvote, or downvote posts as well as comment and post if you want to interact with the community.
Final Thoughts on Lemoa and Its Future
Do note that the servers of the largest Lemmy instances are currently under a lot of load because of Reddit Migration. Your experience may vary, and therefore I recommend you to join a smaller server, they experience a less downtime during a huge migration wave.
Lemoa as an application felt incomplete to me. I was unable to click on posts and read comments, but I’m writing this on the day when Reddit is shutting down its API, and therefore I’m not sure if it’s Lemmy’s server problem or Lemoa’s problem. Still, the log-in process is not streamlined, and the application felt a bit slow.
I hope it gets resolved whenever the Reddit Migration is complete. It is excellent that we have open-source alternatives for the major social media platforms, it allows the communities to grow organically without any algorithm.