Fluxer: Swedish Discord alternative, can be selfhosted, AGPL-3.0 license

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?

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.

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

I don't hate movim, but I think it's too janky to replace discord.

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.

Fluxer is still very much in alpha/beta, and documentation for self-hosting is yet to be written.

If you'd like to host something more mature that offers 90% of the functionality of Discord, I'd recommend hosting an XMPP server, which would enable you to also host a Movim instance on top of it. You can ask for help as a beginner in !selfhosted@lemmy.world to get started :)

You could also use Movim without hosting it yourself, since it's already federated like Lemmy/Piefed are.

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.

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.

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.

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

The website says VoIP, so I'm assuming so

The second link in the body of OP is the dev explaining that he'd been working on it in his spare time for 5 years before releasing it as a public beta on Github.

He does mention using AI in a limited capacity.

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.

Ultimately, you'll have to take my word for it that I'm trying to handle this responsibly. Fluxer is a large, complicated codebase because the project itself is large and complicated. LLMs still aren't capable of autonomously producing anything like what Fluxer is today.

If it were that easy to create something this polished on a whim using only LLMs, we'd already be swimming in credible Discord alternatives.

In short, for Fluxer: PRs should be reviewable, understandable, and test-backed. Submitting generated code you cannot explain, or using an LLM to bypass review standards, isn't acceptable. At the same time, responsible use of LLMs as a tool is fine, and contributors should not be harassed for using them.

Moreover, the OSS release began from a clean slate, so the public commit count doesn't reflect the full private iteration timeline, how long it has been deployed in production, or how extensively it has been tested. Going forward, what matters is that contributions will be reviewed, and tests will be required where appropriate. I also don't condone low-effort, unreviewed AI slop.

I published the project with a squashed history because the early work happened privately, and I didn't want to make 3,000+ messy commits part of the public record. I'm proud of where things are now, and the codebase has improved a lot over the 3+ years it was developed in private. Squashing commits during a closed source to open source transition is common practice, and it doesn't imply the project was vibe-coded.

This is my work, and it's hard-earned. If something seems too good to be true, it's because I've put real effort into making it good.

I get that in the age of LLMs, people are more suspicious and may assume bad intent behind every project. But some projects come from true passion and domain understanding. That's the case for Fluxer.

I could've built and maintained this platform without using LLMs for the mechanical parts of the work. It just would've taken about three times as long. At that pace, I'd need a full-time job to make a living, and then I wouldn't have time for Fluxer anyway. This is the world we live in, and sometimes compromises are unavoidable.

Starting with no money, the realistic options were to raise VC funding (since most people won't back a project like this until it's already close to what they expect), or to use LLMs in a limited, controlled way to speed up the mechanical tasks. I chose the latter so the project could stay independent.

If you feel conflicted about this, know that I do too. I'm happier writing code by hand. Going forward, LLMs don't need to be quite as involved. Now that I've released publicly, I don't necessarily need to work on this alone, and I've prepared the codebase to make it attractive to people who want to self-host the software.

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.