Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.
Moderation transparency is the building block to what comes next: mod elections. That’s the one piece still in the works, after that is done, I’m going to consider it stable.
When I was first considering the Linux packaging question, I did evaluate AppImage, Flatpak, Snap and plain old tar.gz, with AppImage being my favourite. Unfortunately they are not equally polished and AppImage flat out did not work in a consistent manner across multiple Linux variants. Between the rest, tar.gz was ok, but there are a lot of people who don’t know what to do with it. Between Flatpak and Snap, Snap was the vastly more polished experience for the end user and for me, so I bit the bullet on their non-ideal ‘we want to be an Apple App Store clone’ way of working and went with Snap.
It will get whatever it can. You also don’t need a mapped port, Aether can punch holes through firewalls via reverse-opens. (Though having a port open will significantly increase your connection speed and frequency.)
You can look at the port it chooses through netstat, it does not have a fixed port. However, once it gets a working one, it won’t change it from then on so you can map that port.
Edit: you can, but it having an Electron shell for UI (the actual app is Go) makes the build process somewhat complicated. It’s on GitHub though, feel free to take a look at the makefile and give it a shot.
I just tried this. It's got some cool concepts (moderation transparency, commitment to privacy) but I'm not sure it will become as popular as HN/reddit because it isn't a website. You won't stumble across it in a google search. It's been around for 5 years and the forums don't have much activity.
