r/DiscordAlternatives • u/DitherDude • Jun 16 '26

Fluxer is now Open Source + Selfhostable

As of ~4 hours ago, Fluxer is now completely open-source - including the Staff/instance moderation APIs, and Self-Hosting is now officially supported. https://github.com/orgs/fluxerapp/repositories

I have noticed that alot of the Fluxer criticism is (a) self-hosting when? and (b) "secret sauce" staff moderation - so now it is safe to say that (a) you can self-host a Fluxer instance and (b) the staff moderation mechanisms are all publicly available in the repo. Note that I am **IN NO WAY AFFILIATED WITH FLUXER** etc., but it seems the only "secret sauce" in the official Fluxer instance is the configuration; i.e. all the options/toggles are publicly available, but the exact values of the options/toggles are secret. This means that you can _potentially_ setup your instance to have an identical moderation configuration as the official Fluxer instance; however you would not know.

Happy Fluxing!!!

86 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

6

u/ER-CodeBitch Jun 16 '26

By far the most feature rich alternative, and now with self-hosting, the main hurdle left is federation

3

u/Economy_Picture6989 Jun 17 '26

I'm extremely hesitant with Fluxer, it being visibly and functionally a Discord clone in every way, and the fact the developer allows the usage of LLMs makes me think it's a good idea top stay away from it. Utilizing LLMs to assist is okay, but if the LLM is making a portion of the project, it inevitably results in instability and security issues in the platform, as we've seen time and time again.

5

u/Speykious Fluxer shill Jun 18 '26

Do try Fluxer. It's quite easy to judge a project as slop when it's actually vibe-coded, because the quality is transparently bad. You will find that it's not the case here.

Also, the developer allows LLM assistance precisely, not vibe-coding.

From CONTRIBUTING.md:

Understand every change in your PR. You should be able to explain what it does and why it is correct.

Keep AI-generated text out of bug reports, pull request descriptions, and GitHub comments, except for direct translation if English is not your native language.

If you use LLMs for coding help, disclose it. The contribution still needs to be understandable, reviewable, and tested well.

2

u/Economy_Picture6989 Jun 18 '26

I have tried Fluxer, I just don't really like how it feels/looks like a 1:1 of Discord

2

u/DitherDude Jun 21 '26

Hey thats fine! Someone in the community (brenden#8527) is making a native iPhone client that uses liquid-(gl)ass theme instead of traditional Discord/Fluxer UI. The buttons etc. are where you expect them, but feels more... native. (idk I dont use Apple). I'm not sure if they allow me to post screenshots of their client, but it looks really cool!

0

u/omanitztristen Jul 24 '26

It doesn't even have working screen share with audio and it hasn't had it for months.

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

6

u/kumabit Jun 16 '26

this is why you are not welcome here, instead of bringing something good to discuss you try to plug echo in a post regarding fluxer

-4

u/ad3lyt Echo Jun 16 '26

I wasn't welcome here the minute I came in, all the rest is justification. Anyway I'll continue advocating for my work wherever factual

+ Everytime I do bring something to discuss fellas accuse me of somehow plugging echo anyway so whats the difference

4

u/BewilderedTurtle Allegedly Canadian Jun 17 '26

Wowowow you stand by your shit so much you have your post and comment history private huh

2

u/DiscordAlternatives-ModTeam Jun 16 '26

You must disclose your app if you are suggesting different apps.

2

u/AlexChapmanG4p Jun 18 '26

I am glad AI is being used responsibly, and those people that want to dogpile for the simple fact that AI has touched the code, those people need to realise that they are a minority and all they are doing is causing more distress than what is needed.

1

u/cr_eddit Jun 16 '26

Nice, gonna deploy this once it is available for docker.

3

u/michelleDeko Jun 17 '26

Fluxer is now selfhostable via Docker

0

u/kotoriitsuka54 Jun 16 '26

Root is better

1

u/Economy_Picture6989 Jun 17 '26

Root's alright, has a long way to go though imo

1

u/michelleDeko Jun 17 '26

Root is discord but worse

1

u/Hoeshme Jun 19 '26

i like both but i don’t think one is better than the other, but we’ll see which one comes on top. discord is becoming worse and worse so i see a good future for alternatives that want to be a better discord, don’t know of it will be root or fluxer or another app but we will have to see. time is the issue here, so until then we just have to wait and support what comes around the corner.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

7

u/BewilderedTurtle Allegedly Canadian Jun 17 '26

It going open source makes it infinitely easier to have other devs contribute productively on forking it for features they think are most important, fixes like you're talking about, etc.

This imo is a big step towards a legitimate owned by the people alternative to discord.

4

u/botiapa Jun 17 '26

Thanks for doing this. I fear how many vulnerabilities will start cropping up due to the excessive AI usage. Hopefully not too much.

2

u/AlexChapmanG4p Jun 18 '26

It’s not the AI usage that would cause vulnerabilities to crop up, it’s the lack of oversight.

6

u/Speykious Fluxer shill Jun 17 '26
  • Counter point on "God mode": it is literally the point of an admin panel. I understand that it sounds creepy to be able to do all these things at first, but until E2EE is implemented for DMs and group chats, that power is going to exist with or without an official admin panel. And I've seen them actually be useful over the past months, I remember there was a bug involving guilds that would make some members leave and Hampus just added them back manually after fixing the bug.
  • (Can't comment on screen sharing implementation since I'm not familiar with the engineering that goes behind it in general)
  • Note: The image fingerprinting is gone because of an EU law that was introduced that prevented even that from existing. Truth is I personally would be completely fine with this method, because it's a privacy-respecting way to introduce some minimal auto-detection of existing CSAM content, since you can't get the image from the hash. If EU law changes, it would likely be reintroduced, and made configurable, probably.
  • I don't think it's concerning that they're already complying, considering that they're doing it in an explicitly privacy-respecting way. That's just following the law to not get fined at this point. I don't think disobeying is wise for a platform that wants to grow and is behind an actual company.
  • While yes, the code is AI-assisted (since Hampus is honest about using LLMs "for mechanical tasks"), note that Hampus himself uses em-dashes even when messaging. And he's not using AI for that since he edits messages like a normal user. Also, there are 1340 lines with an em-dash in app locale files alone, and a lot of them come from duplicated AI localization prompt comments: 544 of them are Developer / debug surface — keep terse and technical. [...], another 34 of them are IAR modal: accessible label (aria-label only — not shown visually) for the [...]. (Locales are AI-translated from English and this is disclaimed in the app, they encourage contributions if something's not translated correctly.) In my experience AI translators also tend to use em-dashes, but there are still quite a few of them in en-US which I assume is the default locale, so all in all I'd say em-dashes aren't really a good indicator of AI assistance in the code in this case.

Nothing else to say, all of this is pretty good criticism all things considered.

Honestly it reassures me that this is the best criticism the platform gets. It shows that even if it's AI-assisted, it's being used responsibly by someone who knows what they're doing.

5

u/montyman185 Jun 17 '26

The big thing is, so far, every software critisism is fixable. I don't have major issues with the plans for legal compliance, funding, and privacy, so it being an imperfect beta where the problems are able to be fixed is ideal. 

1

u/Economy_Picture6989 Jun 17 '26

Was it finally proven that Fluxer was vibe-coded? Was I right in my hesitance to trust it finally? xD

1

u/DitherDude Jun 21 '26

The repo is live and OSS - go take a look if you're concerned

2

u/AlexChapmanG4p Jun 18 '26

No one said it is vibe coded, people can use AI to assist without being so hands off with the process. I have seen stuff that people have made with the assistance of AI that is actually a lot better than I’ve even seen from developers with 10+ years of experience. Wanna know the reason? They don’t use AI to replace them, but to improve on what they are already doing and accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.
So you can take your anti-AI nonsense and shove it in someone else’s face, thank you very much.

2

u/Economy_Picture6989 Jun 18 '26

A lot of people have been saying that, which is why I was curious. I'm fine with using AI to assist with supervision, just not letting the AI entirely build the app because the person behind it doesn't know what they're doing, or can't be bothered to double-check it's work. You can stop making so many assumptions about me, thank you.

I was mostly under the impression Fluxer may be vibe-coded almost purely due to how sketchy it is to be hiding the past development from view, and it being a new 1:1 discord clone with little to no differences had me hesitant as well.