I've managed to convert one friend so far! Really need the mobile apps next.

These (unofficial) guys seem to have figured out self-hosting and wrote a guide: https://fluxer.world/selfhost.html

kk, I'll give you a call. Hopefully, they don't take too long.

I feel you on this... their latest careers page announcement made me feel a little weird: https://fluxer.app/careers

Like... I'm hoping they're not gonna go full corpo and get VC money and try to IPO and all that stuff...

But, on the other hand: devs gotta eat, servers gotta get deployed. They do need money. If we want them to focus on building Fluxer, then they need to make some money so they don't have to work somewhere else. I originally tried out Stoat, but the main instance is so slow that I wasn't sure if I could recommend it to people. I understand why it's slow. It costs money to rent more powerful servers. I wish Stoat had more money.

Additionally, yeah, both Stoat and Fluxer are AGPLv3, which is good. Previously, Fluxer required signing a CLA, which is not great for building trust with the community. It would give Fluxer the ability to make the project non-free in the future. However, it seems like Fluxer has decided to remove their CLA! This should help limit the amount of damage they can do if they go evil.

Also, also. Fluxer is going to pursue federation. Which would again hopefully protect us a little from an evil Fluxer. Now sure, federation isn't here yet and maybe they could cancel it, but at least we got some interest in it. For Stoat, I believe last I heard they weren't interested in implementing federation. Not sure if this has changed.

tl;dr I also have some uncertain vibes from Fluxer, but so far their actions have been pretty positive, so... innocent until proven guilty? 🤷

but how does the "subscription" stuff work if you self host? I'm not gonna use fluxer on their servers because they put dumb shit behind a paywall like discord does.

Sigh, you need to register before you are allowed to click around. I guess ill wait a bit more then. How are you finding it?

Isn't that just for the version they host? Most of the docs say all features are or will be available in the source code. Although if federated and interacting with their hosted communities would you be restricted?

All those features are only paid if you use their servers. They're still reworking their self hosting version (they had one but they're simplifying it) and if you self host all that is free.

source

I'm repeating it again: Holy smokes, what a ride. Fluxer is taking off much earlier than I'd expected.

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. I'm working on making self-hosting as straightforward as possible and the development environment likewise.

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 announcement in Februrary has changed things.

There's just been a lot of work involved in keeping the production deployment up and running, handling trust & safety concerns, answering support emails, handling billing issues, and working on the refactor at the same time. I'm really excited to open up development and make it easier for others to contribute, and I can't wait to see what the community builds on Fluxer!

As soon as the refactor is ready (not much longer now!), I'll enable PRs and interact more actively and push updates to this repository more frequently. The remaining parts of the refactor are currently being worked on and being tested live in production that has over 125,000 users (and we're only two full-time employees for now). After that, all work will happen openly in public.

The team is also growing, though we remain small and can't offer very competitive salaries just yet – but if you want to work part-time or contract on projects, or you think you're a great fit for the roles we're hiring for (though not as actively across all roles at this time, but we'll keep you on file for when we are), check out the careers page :D

character limit, upload limit, community limit, no username per server unless you pay for a subscription? hard pass.

These limits exist on their own servers. When you host your own server none of this exists, unless you put them there.

animated gif avatar? hard pass. avatars need to be under 32kb they transmit and load so often.

So far I'm lovin matrix, bit it's not really discord alternative, I mean there is no screen sharing or Voice Call ig?

But because I'm into computers and Linux there are somany spaces filled with fellow penguins, I'm not sure if someone else can find rooms for their own hobbies though... 

"Is this Standards? This has to be Standards."

clicks

"Yeah, of course it's Standards."

If I remember right, this has been quietly in the works for years. It aims to be a 1-1 discord replacement.

Screen sharing/streaming, group video channels, voice channels are a priority, some of which completely do not work at all or very limited in stoat (the last I heard about it). I think that is the difference.

A different focus than matrix or stoat which seem more about being a slack alternative first and then voice/video were thrown in later with YMMV results.

Stoat doesn't allow for voice chat or screen sharing. Dead on arrival.

1 - The name problem, even you don't seem to know whether to call it Revolt or Stoat and they were kinda shady about why they were changing the name until they got enough push back to admit they were being forced. 2 - Pretty sure there was a whole Brexit thing a while back that makes them not "EU-developed" 3 - Ultimately, FOSS is often going to have multiple options for something that a majority of people are looking for, because a majority of people can never agree on what features are most important or how best to implement them. Choices are better, if something does a better job for you, you can use it.

Something like Discord is like a community Swiss army knife.

Text channels, threading, voice channels, video streaming, screen capture. And the user interface doesn't look like it still stuck in 2005.

The drawback is that Discord is owned by a for-profit Corpo that is forced to bow to the ever increasing mass surveillance that countries are implementing.

Something like Fluxer functions almost exactly like Discord, but will allow for self-hosting and, eventually, Federation.

No. Use Nostr for that, since it's already overrun by crypto-bros over there.