Fluxer is an open-source, independent instant messaging and VoIP platform. Built for friends, groups, and communities.
https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer
https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/
We will watch this with great interest.
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.
Won’t include any traces of Plutonium,
Whoa whoa, I have to power it with nuclear energy? I dont have a degree for that! /s
In all seriousness, this reads as good right?
I feel like stuff like this works for people who want to move one very specific group of discord, but to replace discord’s ecosystem in a more general sense, federated protocols like matrix are necessary.
Yup. Spun up my own matrix/element server as soon as the announcement dropped. Working on adding Element Call now, but they sure don’t make it easy.
Some people I read here used Mumble in addition to matrix for call stuff maybe can work for you too.
It’d work for me and probably for my wife, but my circle also has people that will already be complaining about making a shift to a new service. I’d like to keep it as simple and familiar as possible, which is why I chose element in the first place. It’s the only fully self-hostable service with text, voice, video, screen share, and different rooms in the same server, all e2ee, all in the same app. Still has some rough edges on the screen share apparently, but I’m fine with that for now, in hopes that element can sort it out eventually.
That’s great. My group of friends are normies so they need custom emojis :D which element doesn’t support, so I’m trying out different Matrix clients. We generally don’t do any voice chat and screen sharing so our use case is simpler. With another group of friends we kinda moved on with voice chat from discord to steam.
Please make sure you document your process and pain points setting this up so others can learn from your experience.
Ever since Discord made their stupid announcement there’s been a flood of replacement messaging programs that made me think of the famous xkcd “industry standards” strip.
Wasn’t Discord itself already part of that, I mean there’s
- general “jabber” protocol stuff
- Google chat/talk
- Discord
- FB messenger
- Signal
- Steam chat/voice
- Teams/Skype/Whatever
- Line
- Kaokao (Korea)
- WhatsApp *WeChat (China)
- etc etc
And that all replaced the oldies like MSN and ICQ etc
These are all mainstream, I meant all the alt/fedi ones, like Stoat, Pumble, Zulip, etc. etc.
Message limits are a bit frustrating, and I need to more about privacy but this looks promising
Wait until an unaffiliated third party hosts it. If only the developers actually run a server, then its no better tgan discord. Or just register on literally any other server that runs something conparable for free without limitations.
Seems worth keeping an eye on but it doesn’t look mature enough to use for now.
How does one go about self hosting something like this, I’ve never done it before, but im not too keen on giving discord my ID or a face scan (definitely not both)
Sadly, the answer can range from super technical to super boiled down version. Depending on individual’s knowledge, money reserves, and the will to set things up the proper way.
Here’s the boiled down version: You will need a server with a public IP address, preferably a hostname. The server has have SSH access. Then it is whichever way is most convenient - direct install, docker, etc.
I, for example, have a Scaleway + Cloudflare DNS for my server and run everything in Docker behind Traefik reverse proxy that automatically serves certificates.
The price is about 15€ for the server per month, DNS is free, domain is under 20€ a year - although way cheaper ones exist.
Is the communications encrypted?
It is not, but I don’t think e2ee is really needed in most contexts.
On one-on-one chats, or closely knit group chats, it does make sense, but for large groups it tends to break things. Any large room on matrix will have encryption disabled.
In the context of discord alternatives, discord doesn’t do encryption in the first place anyway, so it’s not like it would be missed.
I agree that apart from https to and from something like a forum/public chat room there is no point in encrypting that space, since it’s public. However, one on one chats and VoIP calls I think is a different thing. As long as it is made clear that private DMs and calls aren’t encrypted, preferably stated along with all features on the webpage, then it becomes a conscious choice for the consumer/user.
Edit: I did eventually find in the documentation that e2ee is is the pipeline.
I’m avoiding stoat/revolt given the controversy. fluxer seems pretty good as far as centralized alternatives go.
Tldr at bottom
Your link is not working for me. That domain has a blog where the author talks about their Revolt account being terminated (this was over two years ago), but the drama seems to be about one lead contributor banning the author across several servers they moderate. The author gives no explanation for what they actually got banned for and only includes a few dm screenshots that don’t really explain anything. The author links (incorrectly formatted) to this callout post where the author of that complains that the hobby programmers who maintain Revolt in their free time are hobby programmers who maintain Revolt in their free time (as opposed to unpaid developers who dedicate their life to the project). The author literally complains about who they describe as a teenager “playing video games such as Beat Saber VR, Minecraft, Fortnite, Among Us, and Valorant instead of focusing on the product”. Brother it’s not a product you’re not paying for anything. Skimming through the rest of the takedown post, this is your generic right winger “I’m being cancelled for my beliefs, so much for the tolerant left” nonsense that losers do when people stop giving them the time of day they feel they’re owed by others. kate.pet referencing that callout post does not lend credibility to their own claims, I must say.
Tldr there was internet drama two or three years ago that affected like two people, both of whom include screenshots so closely cropped that I feel like one extra message above or below each screenshot would change the context of what’s being said. I would hardly call this a controversy. If you want to avoid it that’s your prerogative, but to me this hardly seems worth writing off the whole project over.
I think the project lead getting thousands in donations while other major contributors get nothing is separate from that stuff.
Okay this is entirely separate yeah. Almost two years old so I wonder if things have changed since then, especially with the rebrand into Stoat. I definitely care more about this than the internet drama blog posts I found before.
Ugh, the link is getting fucked up because everything is interpreting it as markdown.
Does pasting this work?
https://res.kate.pet/upload/202409-lightspeed/lightspeed.tv%20-%20Everyone%20-%20general%20%5B985735035061674006%5D%20(2024-05-21%20to%202024-05-24).htmlThis does work, yeah. The parentheses weren’t getting percent encoded so they interfered with the markdown. This should work now:
It works on my end weirdly, what client are you using?
Ah, that would probably be it. Different markdown parserz and abandoned by its dev iirc
I had no idea about it being abandoned until you said something. I just looked at the play store reviews and lots of people are saying the developer is mia. Guess I’ll keep an eye out for another app with a ui I like in case Sync ever stops working for me. Luckily I haven’t had any problems so far.
Does it have voice channels ?
For matrix Not in the Discord sense. It’s more like Skype or Signal. You start a call and people can join.
But yes Fluxer does. And so does Stoat but there servers are bombarded at the moment
Wait, Fluxer and Stoat have Voice channels ? Am I getting this right?
deleted by creator
Yes both Apps have active voice channels. Just join the voice channel, click in unmute your mic and start yapping !
Which one is easier to self host? Has anyone tried using it on an offline LAN?
Fluxer is less than a week old. So I can’t speak for that. But I’ve heard a few people struggle with Stoat. But the devs and the community are always online to help
The website says VoIP, so I’m assuming so
It might be voice calls.
It is voice channels, also supports screensharing.
I love to see some Gleam in this project, wonderful language.
This was literally started on January 1st this year on github.
This has to be mostly vibe-coded right? Or is it just a UI right now and not functional.
According to the blog:
What I’m about to introduce is a brand new OSS community chat app I’ve worked on solo, on and off, for the past 5 years. I believe it’s one of the closest public attempts at feature parity with platforms like Discord or Slack to date.
Without checking it, it’s likely that the first commit had already years of work.
