EDIT: The Fluxer dev has agreed to remove the CLA!

Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

Also @irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Have safe travels, poVoq!

Fair enough. It definitely isn’t quite as smooth as Discord. I’m hoping that with more funding and users, Movim could get that last bit of polish it needs, but if Fluxer is able to do it first, then fair play honestly.

Like Lemmy a few years ago, there is not yet a large community on Movim. I’m hoping that an exodus of Discord users who give Movim a try will bring with it more activity, just as the reddit API exodus did with Lemmy a couple years back. The first adopters may need to rely on just using it to communicate with friends for a bit as they either wait for others to build communities, or build some themselves, which is what made Lemmy as healthy and vibrant as it is today :)

EDIT 2: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

EDIT: Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

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, 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.

(Movim also doesn’t require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so I’d highly recommend quickly giving it a shot with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D)

But that’s just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.

It’s a promising project for sure, though it will have to prove that it can scale up without bogging down.

As an alternative, there’s also Movim, which uses a more mature back-end. If you’d like, you could try that out with a friend to see if it can handle your needs. It offers both group video calls and screen-sharing (must use a chromium based browser to screen-share with audio for now), and it’s already federated and offers optional encryption based on Signal’s style of encryption.

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.

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.

But my other group that hangs out in there async every day and the occasionally jumps onto an ad-hoc voice chat when people are available to game, or sometimes shares my screen so someone else can watch what I’m doing? None of those things do that.

And we could limp by with an XMPP room for chat and then a link to a Jitsi or Mumble or something when it’s time to do something. But there’s something tight about having the “just call” button right there, tied to the chat you’re already in.

XMPP can do actually that with the Movim client! It’s able to do group voice calls, group video calls, screensharing (now with audio as long as you’re using a chromium based browser), and even has a blog functionality built in :D

The Movim dev is currently working on implementing discord-like servers with rooms.

Also @Skavau@piefed.social and @lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org

Pinging @Five@lemmy.cafe so you know we’re gathering here :)

Isn’t that just another centralized reddit clone like Voat or Tildes? The top/most active communities also aren’t promising… Right-libertarians and Ancaps 😒

Not sure how that would be better than just spooling up another lemmy/piefed instance that allows for NSFW. The big advantage of federation is that the rest of us can continue on even if some instances like LemmyNSFW falter, where as if you ever decided to shut down goatmatrix, that’s it, all of it is gone.

EDIT:

'Matrix is a free speech platform.

Uh oh…

But just like there are people whose idea of internet fun is complain-tainment, there are people who are on the internet for argu-tainment. Again. They should go elsewhere. I get it. It’s fun for some people. But not every place needs to be a dive bar. Those exist on the internet. Go to them. And the last is similar to the others. I’m trying to find the best way to phrase it, but it is trying to show off how much of a worthless asshole you are. Sounds like an odd thing to do. But again, this is entertainment for some people, and if you don’t show them the door, they will think the place is built for them. And if it is built for them, it can’t be built for the folks at the top of the pyramid. And that’s just who I want to build this place for.

So will these behaviors at the bottom lead to a ban? No. We are testing if a different model is possible. We will ask them to leave and make a conscious choice not value their kind of content. If you show up to someone’s party and start messing up the place, and it isn’t that kind of party, they are going to ask you to leave. If someone does, be a developed human being and just leave. In real life, manners would and should work. So why not the internet?

That seems… Very optimistic.

What behaviors will lead to a ban? Is it so free-speech that someone could start an openly white nationalist or neo-nazi community there? If so, that’s how you get Nazi-bars (which is why Voat failed).

I tried to convince myself it’s just a friendly gang of frogs body-slamming some lily pads out in the garden pond, but the illusion was shattered when I realized even frogs need to sleep.