Liftoff

Reddit has been going through a rough patch as of late. The recent API changes have gotten a good chunk of communities riled up, with some even locking the respective subreddits in protest. This unpopular streak of adjustments has inevitably gotten some users to consider alternative platforms, with Lemmy being often mentioned.

If you don’t like using your browser to navigate the platform, then a dedicated desktop app should help. Liftoff is a program that brings Lemmy to your desktop, affording you full functionality over interacting with its many communities.

The software is an effort to provide a solution that handily manages to give users the necessary tools to browse the Lemmy platform undisturbed. To that end, the app is available on mobile and desktop platforms alike, taking a practical approach in terms of interface design.

Front-and center are the trending posts from various popular communities. Users of Reddit will certainly find a number of similarities between the platforms: from the upvoting system to the way posts are presented on the timeline, the accommodation period should be rather swift.

Before interacting with the community, you’ll have to create an account or authenticate an existing one. Once that’s over and done with, you can start using the platform with full privileges.

Feel free to browse the popular communities, subscribe to those that appeal to you and create a personalized feed, and if you’re more particular, add new instances if Lemmy.World isn’t for you.

The search feature is quite well-implemented, most notably as you can search for terms within a particular instance.

If the default configuration isn’t quite up to your liking, then you’ll be happy to know that Liftoff is quite giving with the number of options it lets you modify. Essentially, you can configure the style of the posts on your feed, as well as tweak the styling of the comments to your liking.

Liftoff is a competent desktop app for Lemmy. It brings you closer to your favorite communities in a way that is handled very well: everything works as expected, and I especially found the customizability to be a very welcome addition to it all.