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.
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.
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
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.
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
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’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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
:(
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!
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.
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.
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.
I’ll join and be your friend.
Are there any options out there with screen sharing yet? Last I checked stoat was dragging their feet on it
Movim does, and recently landed screen-sharing application audio too (must use a chromium based browser for now to stream the audio too).
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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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.
