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.
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.
I’ll join and be your friend.
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 but 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.
Now that you mention it, I couldn’t find the blog when I checked. I thought it was just me not being able to find a lit candle in a dark room lol
I’m currently still locked in due to some magnitude of network effect. Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to more news about this program’s development with great interest.
How’s the Linux support? I’m having an issue of finding a platform that works properly with Linux, especially screen sharing. For some reason, audio does not work in screen sharing on Linux with discord or Root.
No such luck on Fedora Silverblue.
Just use the web version I’m a Chromium based browser.
Yeah that seemed to work but no one was watching so I can’t tell ya what it looked like :(
I can’t, their shitty fucking email tracking link won’t open to log into my account.
Haven’t tried it but I’ll give it a go and get back to you.
Hope it does well, but consider how hard it was to get people to move from WhatsApp to discord, getting them to use a niche federated option is going to be an uphill battle for any non-techie groups for a bit.
Why are they already selling a Discord Nitro equivalent for an unfinished Beta???
This feels like a bad sign to me
I’m actually cool with projects being sustainable from the start, rather than hyper scaling off private equity funding before gutting features and selling them back at a later date.
Revolt/Stoat not talking about paid options at all on their main page makes me more suspicious, if anything.
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?
Well lots of ways but immediately adding a paid subscription should be a HUGE RED FLAG. Donations, one time payments, etc are fine. Paywalling features from the get go is bullshit tho. And the fact that discord got away with turning normal features into paid ones for years is insulting and laughable. Using custom emojis being locked behind nitro when fucking MSN messenger from 1999 had that is a sad example of how far we’ve fallen.
Any replacement candidate that’s just “discord from a few versions ago” can go fuck itself. Discord was a blight upon the Internet and it’s downfall should be celebrated, not “hey anyone have a clone of this piece of shit? I want something still shitty, just not this shitty”.
Someone said above that it’s all open source and if you self host your own server you can access all the premium features for free. That seems pretty reasonable.
That’s good to hear. I’ll have to give it a look as I sort through alternatives. In fairness, I am in favor of a nitro style subscription for HD voice and video and larger attachment file sizes when you’re not self hosting and relying on their servers. But all the paid profile customization and emoji use stuff needs to go. We need to no longer accept that anywhere.
I think a lot of digital things, including video games, became much worse with the loss of dedicated servers. It used to be expected that you would rent a server to host your ventrillo/teamspeak server. It used to be much more common to rent a server for your Counter Strike games, or play on someone else’s who did. You’d rent some server space and host your vBulletin forum or hang out on someone elses. We used to be much more self reliant on hosting our communities and now we outsource it to a company that offers it for free and turns us into the product.
You want to not be the product? Self host your services or pay for a server hosting service, one that treats you as a customer and not as some free resource to exploit.
And honestly… For fucks sake how did we get to this point where we expect everything online to be free because it’s “just digital”. No. Fuck no. Bandwith and server space and server time costs money. It cost electricity. It costs actual tangible resources that people love to bring up when you’re talking about how evil AI data centers are, but that’s the whole fucking internet! Data centers and cables and all that shit that makes it work. And so many of y’all sit here and act like it should all be free. It’s “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. That’s what we meant. And it got twisted into this abomination we have now…
Yeah I went off on a rant there. Nothing personal to you, person who responded to me. Just went off on a tangent lol. I appreciated you telling me it can be self hosted. That’s awesome 👍
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
Stoat and Matrix do fine with that model.
Having checked a year ago and checking again now, their UX has barely improved and the GUI is still significantly worse than Discord. They need some sort of monetization strategy for funding and leadership that isn’t a shitshow so that they can make something that people will actually want to use.
I mean, there’s literally a job title called “investor”,
Why are we acting like investors are a good thing now? The platonic ideal of “an investor”, someone who seeds money and hovers hands-off to watch the investment grow, has been dead so long you could be forgiven for thinking it never even existed.
Maybe they don’t want a single revenue source to present undue influence on development. If their revenue is entirely supported by their premium model and they make a decision bad for the community, money dries up. You think Discord would be doing dumb shit like it is, if they weren’t floating off investors and whatever Palantir is throwing at them?
Of all the things to complain about, the fact that people can pay to have an animated avatar or screenshare in 4K (a resolution that a super-minority of people even have a monitor capable of rendering at) is baffling.
y’know, yeah, I’ve been convinced by ye and others, fluxer also feels like it’s not a complete shambles too, which the money was probably a helper towards that
Because people don’t like to donate.
Ideally there will many other self-hosted and federated instances to join without any payments.
Not saying anyone should jump on it right now, just to have a look and keep an eye on it. I definitely wouldn’t invest anything into it until after it’s self-hostable, at the very least.
The most difficult part is not switching but getting my friends to also log up
It’ll get a whole lot easier when they can’t access your community any longer without gov ID. Just start posting some dicks or something.
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!
Are there any options out there with screen sharing yet? Last I checked stoat was dragging their feet on it
Click the link. This one supports screen sharing, and much more.
Oh missed that, thanks. Thought video only included cameras since screenshare wasn’t in the bullet points
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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
NOOOOOO
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?
Or can matrix only talk with matrix, IRC with IRC, XMPP with XMPP, etc?
Yes, they have to be the same protocol to communicate.
perhaps, but you still get feature fragmentation… things like custom emojis, stickers, what video codecs to support (heck i reckon they’d probably focus on chat first and video would only be available within the same app until some organisation effort happened), etc
you can see that a little bit on lemmy with the difference in how blocks work on lemmy vs piefed… piefed blocks on lemmy look like a shadow ban because lemmy doesn’t support the error style piefed uses… i think that’d it anyway
point being: just because software can exchange data and have the same problem domain and even in many cases use the same basic terminology, there can still be plenty of more advanced features that aren’t interoperable
re matrix, it can talk to anything… kinda… the matrix protocol has the idea of “bridges” built into it, so they should be able to translate between your client talking to the server via matrix protocol, and other things like XMPP, IRC, etc (at least in theory)
A lot of these aren’t at all.
softwares
Not a word, my dude, the same way happies isn’t a word.
“happy” isn’t a noun, so no one would try to make it plural.
“Software” is a noun, but the plural version is often the same, i.e. “installed a lot of software.”
But since I was discussing “multiple different” instances of software, it made sense to treat each one as a discrete “software,” thus I used “softwares” to communicate “multiple different discrete instances of software.”
Just like how “people” is plural for “persons” but “peoples” means “multiple groups of people.”
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
@BaraCoded used the brower, Debian package did nothing
I’ll put it in my notes and wait until their distribution system is a little maturer. It looks pretty Discord-adjacent
WELL WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS
I mean, 100 different reasons.
Which could really do with being fixed.
That’s the idea, yeah
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…
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”
“nothing will print us”
What?
Prompt* sorry autocorrect is kicking my ass
So is the paid version just because I like them and want to give them some money or they’re actual feature benefits of the paid version over the free version.
I don’t mind paying in theory but they’re trying to replace a free product so the “pro” version would have to have significant benefits.
You give them money for two things. Your paying the dev so he doesn’t have to work two jobs and can focus on just this one job. Which is ideal for a major project that the lead dev is full time on the project.
And two if you use someone else’s infrastructure. If you arnt using your own hardware then you should be fucking paying money and not being a free loader.
Self host if you don’t want to pay. You get all of the features, there’s no restrictions and you can do what ever you want with it.
Honestly I’m getting pissed at all the stupid projects that charge you money for self hosting. It’s stupid as fuck. So it’s nice to see a project that’s basically pay us and use our servers or host it yourself and have no restrictions.
It’s nearly exactly the same benefits as discord nitro had in 2020. Add a banner, send emojis from other servers, increased bio and upload size, 2x the communities, animated avatars, higher video quality.
Of course I would prefer for these things to be free, but I understand they want this to be profitable and as long as they aren’t going discord’s route of monetizing every area of the platform I do understand it.
I find it also helps the cost is the same as old Nitro was which is pretty affordable IMO.
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
Keeping an eye on this. I got stoat chat up and running, and it’s great so far, but it was a big pain to get ruon my environment, it doesn’t have video calling yet or screen sharing, and it’s still using the Tenor API which just got deprecated some time in January 2026 so GIF search doesn’t work (I have vague plans to try and switch that to Giphy, and submit it to the team for review if I can get it to work).
The team seems to be working on their own solution to the GIF thing
Neat, I’ll keep an eye out for that; ideally they’ll implement something less centralised than Giphy. In the meantime I got their admin panel running in my environment too, by fixing the source, so Giphy is next on my list. I want my users to be able to do gif searches 🤷♀️
Klipy is probably a better option, afaik their api is a dropin replacement and the gif search is much better.
Legend, I appreciate the heads-up (👉ﾟヮﾟ)👉 I’m checking out the docs now!
Looks like they got caught out by this all too, they are asking for another month or so to get a refactor in.
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
