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.
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
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.
You don’t have to fork it. The self-hosted version comes with all features.
That’s sounds reasonable.
I thought so
The thing about built-in enshittification up front is that there is no guarantee that it doesn’t get worse from there.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Try turning off your ad blocker for it. I recommend using a separate profile in Google Chrome (not Chromium) for tricky sites.
Nah.
Haven’t tried it but I’ll give it a go and get back to you.
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.
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.
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
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!
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…
