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.
It’s between commet on matrix or fluxer for me, self-hosted.
The e2ee of matrix is preferred but it’s still a bit too user unfriendly, and screenshare is not performant enough for gaming requiring self-hosting a livekit SFU.
Fluxer similarly uses livekit and will be self hostable and really is the most discord-like 1:1 replacement, but I agree both are alpha at best with commet somewhat ahead.
I’m looking forward to how things shake out. The only certainty is discord is dead for me.
Also you can download commet today and the alternative is promises.
The screen sharing for games is not bad, it depends what you’re used to. I’ve had some Discord headaches before 2022, but game sharing was always the main thing they had even when almost nothing else worked that well.
Also depends on your connection. The shittification throttling on non Nitro accounts tends to screw me over at home.
The response to this mess is gonna be everyone sticking with Discord, not because there’s no alternatives, but because there’s too many alternatives.
I think a lot of communities wont move at all tbh
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 do have to wonder, given the age of the app and the seeming lack of contributors on GitHub, how vibe-coded is this app?
I think some programmers with striped thigh-high socks should take one for the team and work on Fluxer. Seriously!
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 for 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.
That’s sounds reasonable.
I thought so
Right, because why should someone to get an income and pay their server costs?
I understand why there are paid features; I just personally intend to wait until federation drops so I can join an instance that offers Plutonium for free.
The thing about built-in enshittification up front is that there is no guarantee that it doesn’t get worse from there.
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.
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.
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
WELL WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS
I mean, 100 different reasons.
Which could really do with being fixed.
That’s the idea, yeah
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.
Hmm I’m not sure if another RTC server solution is the best way…
I don’t understand.
Self-hosted deployments won’t include any traces of Plutonium,
I’m sure there’s a context here, but it’s funnier without it
This requires an account on a centralized service.
It looks good but I’d rather make an account on a self hosted instance or just use a local account like TeamSpeak 3.
You should actually read the second paragraph in OP.
Are you talking about the “still in development”?
I said the platform is expected to support self hosting soon, that it’s expected to support federation later, and that it’s just something to keep an eye on. Ergo, it will not, in fact, require an account on a centralized service.
Sure. You didn’t really make that clear in the OP.
I will keep an eye on it.
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.
Works on CachyOS 👌
Haven’t tried it but I’ll give it a go and get back to you.
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.
Try turning off your ad blocker for it. I recommend using a separate profile in Google Chrome (not Chromium) for tricky sites.
Nah.
You could try Brave as their ad blocker whitelists things that cause breakage if blocked.
Nah.
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.
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
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!
