Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.
Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.
Paid features? Ew.
I’ll be waiting until federation rolls out. Someone will definitely set up an instance that gives you the paid features for free
edit: replaced fork with instance after finding out that it can be configured
You don’t have to fork it. The self-hosted version comes with all features.
Right, because why should someone to get an income and pay their server costs?
EDIT: The Fluxer dev has agreed to remove the CLA!
Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: there’s a huge red flag; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.
Well spotted!
For one, I am ready to support developers. But this model of software development isn’t going to work out. Doesn’t matter to me if they figure out how to get paid, but this is 100% the foundation of an enshittification model. And being that it’s software based around organizing communities… one thing people need to learn is that people move, communities do not. It’s not worth the risk.
An unexpected but welcome update, the Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!, which puts it back in the running.
EDIT 2: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!
EDIT: Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.
Of all the discord clones, this one does look promising I must admit, especially since the dev has mentioned they’d be open to incorporating federation and some encryption abilities down the road. The GPL license is a good mark, and the dev seems pretty chill. Downside is that’s it’s still very rough and in more of a visually polished alpha state. The dev mentioned they’re about to release a major refactor of the codebase, which they hope will fix the sluggishness the server is experiencing after an influx of new users from the Discord dumpster fire.
Personally, I’d still suggest Movim over Fluxer at the moment.
Movim already has a proven, scalable back-end (XMPP), it’s already federated, already provides good encryption, has 90% feature parity with Discord such as Chats, group video calls, screen-sharing with audio (requires chromium browser to share audio for now), its made in the EU, and it’s ready right now, not some time in the future (if Discord users fleeing discord try Fluxer, they’d be likely to bail on it due to the current bugs and just go back to discord). The Movim developer is also currently working on adding in discord-like channels and rooms.
But that’s just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.
Movim seems less like a Discord alternative and more like a Whatsapp alternative
As I said, the discord-style server/rooms are currently being worked on. After which, it should functionally be pretty much 1:1 with Discord. The only thing it’d be missing is the Forums feature, but instead it does have a pretty cool blog feature :)
I set up stoat and I’m loving it so far, I’ll be curious to follow the development of this as well but I think the few people I got to join stoat out of the two dozen on my discord server would tar and feather me if I started talking about yet another alternative after the teeth pulling that was getting them to join the first one lol
I mean, that’s fair. Stoat just seems to have stagnated in development. Plus they openly admit they have no plans for federation. This one is newer and has quite a lot more features.
I think the discord exodus kicked their ass into gear dev wise, they seem to have finished up the rebranding (discord no longer shows revolt as the activity) and the desktop app got a few new features yesterday. But yeah, the lack federation thing is a definite downside, I think you can self host but it doesn’t seem to be super intuitive (granted I’m not the most technical). I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this though. Thanks for sharing it!
Self-hosted deployments won’t include any traces of Plutonium,
I’m sure there’s a context here, but it’s funnier without it
lol, plutonium is their paid version of the software, so they’re just saying that nothing will print us to “upgrade”
deleted by creator
The most difficult part is not switching but getting my friends to also log up
I miss using Mumble. I think it was great, but very barebones. I don’t think I’d be able to convince my friends to switch there. But this is something, at least.
It always feels great seeing Mumble mentioned, especially with such a positive sentiment. I was a core dev, or am but have been mostly inactive for a long time now.
Discord with millions in funding and a dev team - Mumble with contributors you can count on one hand obviously can’t keep up. If a community wants text messaging, that’s just not Mumble’s target of primarily voice communication. Whether that’s because of limited resources/people or a deliberate target scoping.
My clan briefly switched from Mumble to Teamspeak for a while. I was happy to see that the majority preferred Mumble and we moved back to Mumble back then. That was still before Discord was a thing.
Copying it here:
Caution
Holy smokes, what a ride. Fluxer is taking off much earlier than I’d expected.
Over the past month, I’ve been working on a major refactor that touches every part of the codebase. The goal is to make Fluxer easier to develop, fully documented, and much simpler and lighter to self-host. This update also includes plenty of bug fixes and improvements, and it should help the Fluxer.app hosted deployment handle the current load far better.
I know it’s hard to resist, but please wait a little longer before you dive deep into the current codebase or try to set up self-hosting. I’m aware the current stack isn’t very lightweight. In the next update, self-hosting should be straightforward, with a small set of services: Fluxer Server (TypeScript) using SQLite for persistence, Gateway (Erlang), and optionally LiveKit for voice and video.
Self-hosted deployments won’t include any traces of Plutonium, and nothing is paywalled. You can still configure your own tiers and limits in the admin panel.
Thanks for bearing with me. Development on Fluxer is about to get much easier, and the project will be made sustainable through community contributions and bounties for development work. Stay tuned – there’s not much left now.
I thought I could take it a bit easier while shipping this stabilising update, but Discord’s recent announcement has changed things.
As soon as the refactor is live, I’ll interact more actively and push updates to this repository more frequently. The remaining parts of the refactor are currently being worked on and are being tested by a small group of testers before I’m comfortable pushing everything publicly. After that, all work will happen openly in public.
❤️
Btw, activitypub integration?
It looks like they’re deploying this right now:
Fluxer HQ will likely remain unavailable for the coming few hours as I get this update deployed. The rest of the platform remains available. Please bear with us as we work to get the refactor deployed which should fix this and other issues you’ve been having! <3
Hmm I’m not sure if another RTC server solution is the best way…
I don’t understand.
Just because you call it universal doesn’t mean everyone will use it or use it properly. Look at usbc it’s fuckeddd
I didn’t call anything universal…
Why are they already selling a Discord Nitro equivalent for an unfinished Beta???
This feels like a bad sign to me
How… Do you think projects get seed money? Like do you think daddy bezo just appears from thin air to grant people endless wealth to work on major projects?
They could’ve just made it donations, or made less of the features require premium.
Stoat and Matrix do fine with that model.
How do you think things get funding
I mean, there’s literally a job title called “investor”, where the whole point is to go around looking for things that are in early stages of developing and going “HERE’S SOME MONEY, IF YOU GIVE ME A PERCENTAGE OF ALL FUTURE PROFITS”
Edit: no autocomplete, I don’t want to say “Wales stage”, wtf
I do have to wonder, given the age of the app and the seeming lack of contributors on GitHub, how vibe-coded is this app?
If you check the dev’s blog you’ll find they’ve been working on it for 5 years and published a squashed version of the history on GitHub when they cleaned up the code for public release
Welp, that blog wasn’t linked anywhere on the main page.
Reading through it, it actually makes it all seem a lot more reasonable, that’s good. It’s just difficult not to be skeptical in <current year>.Edit:
Fluxer was largely built before LLMs became a normal part of day-to-day development. I do use them now, but in a limited way: as a rubber duck and for mechanical implementation work when I already have a detailed spec. I treat the code it outputs like I would any external contribution.
No LLM designed the system, wrote the specs, or made architectural decisions. That was all me. I only use LLMs when I already know the platform well enough to review the result properly.That seems fairly okay.
Further edit: wording.
I think some programmers with striped thigh-high socks should take one for the team and work on Fluxer. Seriously!
So what do you think?
Fucking hell, can people please just band together and build one piece of software that works well and is federated? There are like 17 of these clones already, this is doing no one good.
I’ll do it. Then we can have 18 clones.
927
As long as they’re federated, does it matter if there’s multiple different softwares? Wouldn’t they be able to communicate with each other, so it’s not like each would be in its own silo?
Or can matrix only talk with matrix, IRC with IRC, XMPP with XMPP, etc?
As long as it doesn’t result in silos, I think having multiple choices is a good thing. It gives you options, and can grow in multiple directions to suit different needs. Plus there’s redundancy so no single point of failure. Part of what’s good about open source is that anyone can fork it, right?
No, because most of them suck
Ehh I have the most faith in matrix but it definitely isn’t perfect and barely a discord replacement .
Someone mentioned commet as a discord like matrix client the other day. I’ve trialled it using my matrix setup, and it looks and feels very clean, I definitely prefer it to element.
Unfortunately as the tale always goes, it’s not quite on par with element in features (it claims to have RTC support using livekit, but I couldn’t find the group call option), but it’s definitely one of the more interesting clients to come about recently. I really like the separation of spaces and personal chats, and the multiple accounts feature is useful from a sysadmin perspective.
Once they manage voice channels with RTC, I think matrix will finally have its discord alternative that could see some adoption with everyday users.
@javiwhite @ComradeRachel did the same and agree with your assessment. Very promising and much faster then Element… and multi account built in.
Oh did you both install it? It’s neither on Flathub nor F-Droid
I installed it locally using the deb package on their GitHub. They also have apks and I believe a flatpak too (don’t quote me on that though).
The android APK is a little funky (I kept getting the notification “you’ve been invited to a room” for every message I’d receive) so I switched back to using element x for the time being, but commet is now my go to client for my laptop, as I don’t use that machine for VC anyway.
You’re right in the sense that none of it is hosted on app repositories though; they’ve still got some ways to go on that front.
