This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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 think some programmers with striped thigh-high socks should take one for the team and work on Fluxer. Seriously!
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 .
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.
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?
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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 👌
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?
