It’s a selfhostable discord clone. At feature parity to discord before enshittification.

On the roadmap as well:

Fluxer will add end-to-end encryption to personal notes, DMs and group DMs. It will be required, with no setting to turn it off. We're building it on MLS (Messaging Layer Security), an IETF Standards Track protocol published as RFC 9420 in July 2023.

Communities, the large public spaces with moderation and search, are not part of this plan.

polyproto, the family of specifications behind our federation plans in #4, includes polyproto-mls... We will most likely build our encryption in line with it and help finish it.

The timeline is the same as for federation. An experimental draft that you can try arrives in 2026, and the stable release follows in 2027.

https://fluxer.app/blog/roadmap-2026#5-end-to-end-encryption-for-notes-dms-and-group-dms

matrix is much better than discord IMO

These two things just aren't directly comparable. You need an application to use Matrix, and there are only a handful that support all the features and of them, only a couple are stable and of those, none of them have a good (or any) UX for onboarding or administration or for channels with a large membership.

Element is the poster app for Matrix, but its clearly made by and for the people who design the protocol. Why do channels get an unread indicator when someone changes their name? Why must I see every time a user joins or leaves a room with no setting to turn it off for large rooms? Why can't I turn off unread indicators for a room I really don't care about constantly staying up to date on? How does the app even allow people to sign in without verifying their device cryptographically, so the app can announce to everyone else that they are an incomplete user? I can go on and on. I'm really liking Sable so far as an alternative, but it is constantly breaking and still suffers from some of the same issues as they're just bound to the protocol.

I use these apps, I like them, but if they're better than Discord to you then I'm happy, but you're an edge case.

Sorry, you didn't deserve this rant. Please forgive me. I hope fluxer (and matrix of course) does well and I am interested in how polyproto ends up working for it.

I don't think they are comparable. Discord is built around communities (servers) with text and voice chats in one place, while Matrix is more about personal and group text chats. Spaces do exist in Matrix but they are not so convenient and there are no voice chats. I'd prefer Matrix for personal communication and Discord-like platforms for big thematic communities.

https://fluxer.app/blog/how-i-built-fluxer

The main dev has maintained that Fluxer is not vibe coded. Whether or not they're completely AI-free though, I'm unsure of. But at the very least they didn't just ask Claude "give me a discord like chat app" and then shove that onto the internet.

Just tried out their official Android app. Doesn't seem vibe-coded at all. Very stable and high guality experience. Also the project began in 2023 (or even earlier) when LLMs were arguably still to weak for writing functional code, so at least it didn't start as a vibe-coded project.

It's not a new standard. They didn't invent it. Different protocols often work better for different usecases.

This xkcd is more succinct than any tldr