I suspect fluxer is gonna be where all the discord users inevitably flee to, should that come to pass… But I’ve always been bothered by the project for some reason.
I feel like the vibes are off on the whole thing, which makes me super suspicious of it even if I don’t have an obvious answer as to why that may be.
Yes, they optionally ask for money, which is GOOD. Hosting fluxer.app costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Hiring more devs costs money. Food costs money. Rent costs money. If the devs can’t pay their bills, then they’ll have to get some other job, which is BAD for the project.
Have you guys used Stoat?? It’s slow as hell. Last time I checked, they purposely disabled some of the calling features because they couldn’t afford the bandwidth on their public instances. Getting money is GOOD!
I guess some of the Matrix folks are a little miffted that Fluxer is eating their lunch, but dudes and dudettes, Matrix has a LOT of work to do on UI/UX to get people to use it. I convinced my programmer friends to switch to Matrix. We used Element. It sucked ass. Sure the encryption and tech is cool, but at the end of the day, if I can’t receive my friend’s messages because of some encryption roadblock, then it’s not useful. After a few days, everyone got fed up with Matrix and went back to Discord.
Fluxer has a familiar UI that people already know and like. It looks pretty, which matters. It’s true Open Source. They provide self-hosting. They’re working on federation (unlike Stoat). Mobile apps are just coming out. They’re getting funding so they can continue to focus on the project. It’s a real viable chance to take back some power from Big Tech that your friends would actually move to.
P.D. If you can actually convince your friends to switch to Matrix, then great. I managed to convince my small group of friends to try out Fluxer and we’re still on Fluxer, so I guess we moved. Let’s just get off of Discord!
I’ve been vouching for it since it admittedly works pretty well, but lately I’m back on the fence. I was under the impression that it only started as a vibecoded project, but has shifted gears since (and while I don’t like to excuse AI slop bullshit, unfortunately it is much more common in software dev than anything else). I thought I read that since putting a team together it’s become much better in that regard, but judging by very recent commit histories that doesn’t seem to be the case.
All of that, plus the early payment options and general corporate feel to it, I’m not really vouching for it much any more. It’s already starting to feel kind of bloated.
Unfortunately I still can’t really see most active discord users switching to any other alternative, because Fluxer is the only one that really aims to replicate the experience.
I mean realistically Matrix is what people should, but won’t use. So ignoring that Ive been sorta cheering for stoat.
The team actually seems to care about the project in like that… “old school open source” way, and they dont use ai. I believe funding is all donation only too, which is quite nice.
They had like 4 lines of ai code they removed and some people took that as ‘omg stoat uses ai’ and ran away from it, but IMO stoat is a good balance between discord-like and my “vibe check” as it were.
Agreed, though tbh even I found Matrix extremely confusing, buggy, and lacking features when I last tried it, I can’t imagine how non-technical users would find it. I don’t see it ever really becoming a massively widespread replacement (not that it needs to be, they’re very much doing their own thing).
Stoat felt really clunky last time I tried it but that was way back when Discord first announced the age bullshit, so maybe I’ll give it another look. Maybe I’m misremembering and/or it’s changed since then, but I don’t recall self-hosting and decentralization being on their roadmap?
Stoat is technically self hostable iirc, as everything is open source but federation isn’t planned so there’s not as much draw to selfhosting it, since you’d basically have a completely disconnected instance.
To me, that’s an acceptable con of the ‘vibe’ based decision I’m making, but to others it may not be.
and yeah stoat’s servers struggled with the large influx of people.
It feels corporate and the essential features like self hosting and federation are roadmapped, which is just a promise. I really get that there’s serious issues with Matrix, but in the “leaving discord” wars it doesn’t feel fair for them to carry baggage of years of real world concerns and issues, only for a project like this to present a clean slate as superior rather than untested.
While I do agree, it is also just a single developer making this. I’m definitely disappointed with the priorities, but I respect how much work he’s been putting into it
I think it’s more-or-less accurate to say that it’s “just a single developer”.
While it’s technically true that more than one developer has committed code, the comically overwhelming vast majority of commits were made by a single developer and a battery of automated tools. If we exclude those bots (at least, the obvious ones), then the remaining maybe-human contributors have been responsible for less than 0.2% of the total codebase.
I suspect fluxer is gonna be where all the discord users inevitably flee to, should that come to pass… But I’ve always been bothered by the project for some reason.
I feel like the vibes are off on the whole thing, which makes me super suspicious of it even if I don’t have an obvious answer as to why that may be.
What a lousy reason not to break free from Discord.
Fluxer provides Open Source freedom. It’s full AGPLv3, no community edition bullshit: https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/main/LICENSE
Like, Real Open Source ™️ freedom because they don’t require a CLA, like a lot of fake Open Source projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/FluxerApp/comments/1r8724q/heads_up_fluxer_has_a_big_red_flag_it_requires/
They promised self-hosting… and it’s HERE (it’s on the frontpage!): https://docs.fluxer.app/operator/get-started/
Yes, they optionally ask for money, which is GOOD. Hosting fluxer.app costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Hiring more devs costs money. Food costs money. Rent costs money. If the devs can’t pay their bills, then they’ll have to get some other job, which is BAD for the project.
Have you guys used Stoat?? It’s slow as hell. Last time I checked, they purposely disabled some of the calling features because they couldn’t afford the bandwidth on their public instances. Getting money is GOOD!
I guess some of the Matrix folks are a little miffted that Fluxer is eating their lunch, but dudes and dudettes, Matrix has a LOT of work to do on UI/UX to get people to use it. I convinced my programmer friends to switch to Matrix. We used Element. It sucked ass. Sure the encryption and tech is cool, but at the end of the day, if I can’t receive my friend’s messages because of some encryption roadblock, then it’s not useful. After a few days, everyone got fed up with Matrix and went back to Discord.
Fluxer has a familiar UI that people already know and like. It looks pretty, which matters. It’s true Open Source. They provide self-hosting. They’re working on federation (unlike Stoat). Mobile apps are just coming out. They’re getting funding so they can continue to focus on the project. It’s a real viable chance to take back some power from Big Tech that your friends would actually move to.
P.D. If you can actually convince your friends to switch to Matrix, then great. I managed to convince my small group of friends to try out Fluxer and we’re still on Fluxer, so I guess we moved. Let’s just get off of Discord!
I’ve been vouching for it since it admittedly works pretty well, but lately I’m back on the fence. I was under the impression that it only started as a vibecoded project, but has shifted gears since (and while I don’t like to excuse AI slop bullshit, unfortunately it is much more common in software dev than anything else). I thought I read that since putting a team together it’s become much better in that regard, but judging by very recent commit histories that doesn’t seem to be the case.
All of that, plus the early payment options and general corporate feel to it, I’m not really vouching for it much any more. It’s already starting to feel kind of bloated.
Unfortunately I still can’t really see most active discord users switching to any other alternative, because Fluxer is the only one that really aims to replicate the experience.
I mean realistically Matrix is what people should, but won’t use. So ignoring that Ive been sorta cheering for stoat.
The team actually seems to care about the project in like that… “old school open source” way, and they dont use ai. I believe funding is all donation only too, which is quite nice.
They had like 4 lines of ai code they removed and some people took that as ‘omg stoat uses ai’ and ran away from it, but IMO stoat is a good balance between discord-like and my “vibe check” as it were.
Stoat is not currently interested in federation though: https://developers.stoat.chat/faq/
Agreed, though tbh even I found Matrix extremely confusing, buggy, and lacking features when I last tried it, I can’t imagine how non-technical users would find it. I don’t see it ever really becoming a massively widespread replacement (not that it needs to be, they’re very much doing their own thing).
Stoat felt really clunky last time I tried it but that was way back when Discord first announced the age bullshit, so maybe I’ll give it another look. Maybe I’m misremembering and/or it’s changed since then, but I don’t recall self-hosting and decentralization being on their roadmap?
Stoat is technically self hostable iirc, as everything is open source but federation isn’t planned so there’s not as much draw to selfhosting it, since you’d basically have a completely disconnected instance.
To me, that’s an acceptable con of the ‘vibe’ based decision I’m making, but to others it may not be.
and yeah stoat’s servers struggled with the large influx of people.
It feels corporate and the essential features like self hosting and federation are roadmapped, which is just a promise. I really get that there’s serious issues with Matrix, but in the “leaving discord” wars it doesn’t feel fair for them to carry baggage of years of real world concerns and issues, only for a project like this to present a clean slate as superior rather than untested.
Selfhosting is not roadmapped, it’s available today, and has been for months.
While I do agree, it is also just a single developer making this. I’m definitely disappointed with the priorities, but I respect how much work he’s been putting into it
It was originally. Lots of people bought Plutonium and he has now added additional developers.
Hmm, to my knowledge he is still the only active dev, maybe you’re right though
He is not, and has not been for quite some time.
I think it’s more-or-less accurate to say that it’s “just a single developer”.
While it’s technically true that more than one developer has committed code, the comically overwhelming vast majority of commits were made by a single developer and a battery of automated tools. If we exclude those bots (at least, the obvious ones), then the remaining maybe-human contributors have been responsible for less than 0.2% of the total codebase.
Source: did some math on numbers from their github repository stats.