Fluxer: A chat app that puts you first
fluxer.app
Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

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.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    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?

  • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • iuminou@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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

  • deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zipEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    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.

      • Rachel@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Ehh I have the most faith in matrix but it definitely isn’t perfect and barely a discord replacement .

        • Javi@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          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.

              • Javi@feddit.ukEnglish
                2·
                8 months ago

                I installed it locally using the deb package on their GitHub. They also have apks and I believe a flatpak too (don’t quote me on that though).

                The android APK is a little funky (I kept getting the notification “you’ve been invited to a room” for every message I’d receive) so I switched back to using element x for the time being, but commet is now my go to client for my laptop, as I don’t use that machine for VC anyway.

                You’re right in the sense that none of it is hosted on app repositories though; they’ve still got some ways to go on that front.

  • patheticfantasy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      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.