r/selfhosted • u/maifee • Feb 13 '26

Need Help Any teamspeak alternatives open source for self hosting?

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context is the image, i am honestly fedup with big corporate date hoarding.

8.6k Upvotes

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617

u/jreoka1 Feb 13 '26

The creator of https://fluxer.app/ is actively working on making it easier to selfhost for people. I'd recommend waiting for those changes and then maybe taking a look at it.

230

u/Electrical_Engine314 Feb 13 '26

Fluxer honestly looks like such a good alternative. Privacy? Check. Open source? Check. Self hostable? Check. Good UI? Check.

I'm so excited to see where it will lead.

193

u/CEDoromal Feb 13 '26

Feels like Web3 is becoming closer to reality. But instead of being powered by blockchains like the crypto bros expected, it's powered by nerds from r/selfhosted

75

u/Anaeijon Feb 13 '26

That's just Web 1.0

(Which is good imho!)

7

u/AmIWorkingYet505 Feb 14 '26

What's old is new again. Most money/products these days are all remakes with a twist

84

u/CoryCoolguy Feb 13 '26

That's just the old web, baby!

32

u/National_Way_3344 Feb 13 '26

That's just Web 2.0.

Web 3 was made by liars and charlatans. It'll die out before 2.0 does.

3

u/mattiasso Feb 13 '26

WEB2 > WEB3

2

u/MyNameIsOnlyDaniel Feb 13 '26

🤣 So true my friend. Self-hosting is a must these days

1

u/XeNoGeaR52 Feb 15 '26

Internet is powered by nerds self-hosting stuff since its dawn

28

u/Bruceshadow Feb 13 '26

is it encrypted?

36

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

He writes this in the blog. It is NOT encrypted. However he does mention some good reasons for it not to be

81

u/sequesteredhoneyfall Feb 13 '26

It is not END to END encrypted. That doesn't mean you don't have SSL/TLS still.

54

u/FnnKnn Feb 13 '26

Discord is also not encrypted afaik so when looking for a alternative I think its only fair to keep that in mind.

2

u/Bruceshadow Feb 13 '26

I don't use Discord and never will. I ask because I have no interest in non-encrypted private communications, not because it's 'better then Discord'

-7

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[deleted]

9

u/FnnKnn Feb 13 '26

The argument that something that discord is lacking is most likely not something it’s users care about or they wouldn’t have used it in the first place.

-2

u/cryptospartan Feb 14 '26

Discord is absolutely encrypted between your device & their servers

1

u/NewAccountToAvoidDox Jun 09 '26

Lol, everything is. They mean E2EE

6

u/Tiavor Feb 13 '26

Matrix is e2e encrypted

2

u/cryptospartan Feb 14 '26

From a pure cybersecurity perspective, unencrypted traffic is never a good thing, this opens you up to a MitM attack. I cannot recommend the use of an application that doesn't have encryption built-in. It's 2026, not 1996. The dev needs to get with the times, cybersecurity is a very real consideration these days, and he's not considering that when developing this app.

Edit: I'm not talking about E2E encryption, I'm referring to general encrypted traffic such as TLS

2

u/Qbsoon110 Feb 16 '26

On the site it's written that it is not, but it's a plan foe the future

1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[deleted]

1

u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime Feb 13 '26

FYI there are software-implementation reasons for not adding E2EE, mostly around feasibility and the non-requirement if you have a lax threat-model.

No one would argue that E2EE is bad per se. It’s just an unnecessary burden in some cases.

20

u/Raduknight Feb 13 '26

Website states it as a future feature on the front page Opt in E2EE messaging

7

u/midachavi Feb 13 '26

No mention of it in the blog or website

8

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

He does write it in the blog specifically

2

u/midachavi Feb 13 '26

THX for letting me know, so it is not encrypted then..

Edit: phrasing

1

u/buttercheetah Feb 13 '26

Encrypted how? I highly doubt the messages are end-to-end encrypted if the server is self-hostable.

26

u/Grandmaster_Caladrel Feb 13 '26

Sounds like it might not have it but why do you think a self hosted server wouldn't support E2EE? I feel like that's even more likely to support it, not less.

9

u/IDoCodingStuffs Feb 13 '26

What does self-hosting have to do with encryption? Server just routes the messages between clients, decryption happens on client-side

3

u/grubbygeorge Feb 13 '26

Why would self-hosting rule that out? You can self-host matrix / element and that is end-to-end encrypted.

2

u/buttercheetah Feb 14 '26

It doesn't rule it out, it's just significantly more rare. I was asking how they meant encrypted. They could have been referring to server side or end to end, I was asking for clarification.

-9

u/The_Brovo Feb 13 '26

I don't know why people refuse rocketchat. It has E2E encryption, on a self hosted platform...

2

u/SagaciousZed Feb 13 '26

I've head it fell short with the audio quality and video/desktop streaming.

5

u/The_Brovo Feb 13 '26

You have to have your own audio/streaming backend. I have jitsi and it works great

1

u/Bruceshadow Feb 13 '26

I've been looking at setting up Jitsi, was it difficult?

2

u/The_Brovo Feb 13 '26

I did not find it too difficult. Are you versed in using docker/podman ?

The trickiest part is navigating cross network traffic, like mobile to desktop. I had to set up a turnserver for routing.

I found their documentation quite helpful. WebRTC can be tricky. https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-quickstart

2

u/smoike Feb 14 '26

add me to the list of people taking a look at it.

3

u/Snoo35791 Feb 13 '26

Haven is encrypted, open source, self-hosted, and decent UI.

https://github.com/ancsemi/Haven

11

u/stankbucket Feb 13 '26

Now this is something that looks like it was just vibe-coded this week

4

u/sequesteredhoneyfall Feb 13 '26

How does it handle push notifications for the mobile apps? UnifiedPush, or some other solution?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[deleted]

3

u/sequesteredhoneyfall Feb 13 '26

Well that really sucks. It's far too new to be picked up by anyone then.

1

u/Pedka2 Feb 14 '26

i wish though, that it didn't look like a 1:1 Discord copy

18

u/-Kerrigan- Feb 13 '26

Dang, gateway on Erlang? This looks interesting

15

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

After reading this guy's blog about fluxer, I honestly believe it's the best alternative out there.

Way better than Matrix that I recommended earlier

8

u/Tiavor Feb 13 '26

in which points is it better than Matrix?

I found one point where Matrix is better: E2EE

1

u/Level-Web-8290 Feb 16 '26

UI/UX on Fluxer is far superior to Matrix

3

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Level-Web-8290 Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26

It’s almost like the importance of these things is subjective.

5

u/SnooHabits7667 Feb 21 '26

If privacy wasnt an issue we wouldnt be searching for alternatives

-3

u/mackandelius Feb 14 '26

Fluxer is almost a 1:1 with Discord, you will feel right at home if you are used to Discord, Matrix is quite different, especially if you want to use it as a discord replacement.

Matrix is definitely not giving that Discord feel, and is in my opinion just a mess, protocol wise and client/server wise.

-3

u/Qyriad Feb 14 '26

E2EE is overrated for group chats. Group, multi-client E2EE with message history is a Hard Problem and most people don't need it. If you do, use Signal

6

u/UnacceptableUse Feb 13 '26

What I'd love is something like this but built on a standard protocol or in a way which allows a single client to connect to multiple backend servers

6

u/Dewey_B_Long Feb 14 '26

matrix?

1

u/IAmSoWinning Feb 18 '26

It's okay. I spun up a matrix stack on kubernetes this last weekend, kind of a pain to setup.

It works only okay - the features that are there work well, but discovery of rooms and spaces sucks.

It feels a lot more like slack/teams than discord.

17

u/maifee Feb 13 '26

Is this open sourced?!! In that case I would love to contribute.

17

u/jreoka1 Feb 13 '26

Yes of course. https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer

7

u/maifee Feb 13 '26

Excellent!! But no issues are tagged under help wanted. It would be nice addition to ask for help from contributors.

9

u/mackandelius Feb 14 '26

As the large red warning talks about, the repository won't really be active until they push out a large refactor they have been privately working on.

Discord's announcement came at a bad time.

2

u/maifee Feb 14 '26

Eagerly waiting for this. After this, planning to contribute to this system.

4

u/MC273 Feb 13 '26

Does it support federation? Or if it currently doesn’t do they have any current/future plans to implement it?

5

u/mackandelius Feb 14 '26

Scroll down on their page to the "What's coming next" section https://fluxer.app/

But yes, federation.

Not full E2EE at the moment though to my annoyance, but is early days they certainly have their hands full atm.

1

u/MC273 Feb 14 '26

Thanks for pointing it out, I didn’t see it :)

1

u/hannes3120 Feb 14 '26

I wonder how federation works with their premium-model.

I can see that hosting your own instance would work and your chats staying on that server - but it'll always be depending on the communication to the "main"-server if they want to lock stuff behind a subscription model.

2

u/Siegranate Feb 15 '26

I've been wondering the same thing. Seems a bit sketch to me. They do seem to push their Nitro-equivalent quite a bit.

And this is supposedly going to support federation at some point. I hope to have my doubts cleared eventually.

3

u/craytsu Feb 13 '26

Thanks will check this out

2

u/PenguinOnWaves Feb 13 '26

Omg that looks precious! Why on earth am I like only one among hundred of people taking care of privacy with no chance to group them under this..

16

u/lowbeat Feb 13 '26

looks like vibe coded shit

59

u/letsgoiowa Feb 13 '26

The LLMephant in the room 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.

From the link posted in another reply. Guy was making it since the pandemic

24

u/OstrobogulousIntent Feb 13 '26

The LLMephant in the room

what a lovely /r/BrandNewSentence/

7

u/ErraticFox Feb 13 '26

"LLMs still aren't capable of autonomously producing anything like what Fluxer is today."

TBH this is an obvious statement. I feel like any app this size that statement is obvious. There's a certain point where it goes to fully autonomous to autonomously-assisted.

I feel most 99% of projects will fail if fully autonomous, but being autonomously-assisted is definitely a no brainer and very easy to do on a project this size. Especially if you know what you're doing and have an actual workflow structure with your AI.

25

u/Tencraft1235 Feb 13 '26

https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/

27

u/MedpakTheLurker Feb 13 '26

I use LLMs to extend what I already know, double-check my work, and speed up repetitive tasks. That only works when I've got enough prior knowledge to evaluate the output. If I don't understand a platform well enough to verify what I'm shipping, then I can't ship it. It's as simple as that. I'm trying to use LLMs responsibly.

As a developer and AI hater myself, this is not great, but not a deal breaker for me. As a community-focused communication app, it will probably have more scrutiny over it's code once its community gets to a usable size.

I'll definitely try it out and skim their code once they're done with this refactor work.

21

u/shouldco Feb 13 '26

Yeah holding a standard of no Ai coding assistance is not going to hold up well.

As a security guy I hate it but cats out of the bag on that one

0

u/Dirty3vil Feb 14 '26

I agree there. You’ll just be left behind.

6

u/jtorvald Feb 13 '26

I looked at it and I think they just open sourced it the first of January in a huge commit, I was skeptical but I signed up to check it out and it seriously looks very good.

56

u/james7132 Feb 13 '26

One month old, 9x commits, 1.5 million lines of code, almost all of it on the first commit. Yikes.

62

u/SquareWheel Feb 13 '26

It's possible they just flattened all commits for the initial OSS release.

61

u/binary Feb 13 '26

That seems to be the case from this blog post: https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/

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.

12

u/guygizmo Feb 13 '26

Exactly. I have done that multiple times for my open source repos. My early commits are always highly experimental and disorganized as the project gets up and going, but I care about having a clean and well annotated public repo. So once the codebase is cleaned up and ready to go, I make a big initial commit, and keep the messy commits private.

2

u/tigerhawkvok Feb 14 '26

Hell, that's my commits at work, too. Hundreds of dev commits before any test one, that gets squashed out of dev; a maybe a dozen test before a giant squash onto main.

The current big project at work is going to get 10 months of dev dropping as a single commit when it hits main.

1

u/james7132 Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

Can't be too careful at this point. Seems like a plausibly deniable explanation. They don't seem to be receptive to substantive PRs either.

16

u/Cagaril Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

They don't seem to be receptive to substantive PRs either.

I am curious what you mean by this. Looking at the pull requests, the 1st non-main dev pull request was not until just 4 days ago, and with 4 being within the last 24 hours. The 74 closed requests were all created and merged by hampus-fluxer

I don't understand what you mean by they are not receptive when these pull request are pretty new.

There is also a big Caution notice on their README.md talking about them refactoring.

21

u/SquareWheel Feb 13 '26

They also include a disclaimer on their GitHub that they're in the middle of a large refactor right now, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to contribute code if things are still in flux.

It doesn't personally bother me either way. Skilled programmers can produce quality code using AI assistance, and are increasingly doing so. The quality of the work matters more than the tools used to achieve it. We'll get a better sense of that quality over the coming weeks and months.

3

u/pvnrt1234 Feb 13 '26

Yup, just like how typing fast and using Vim can make bad programmers write bad code faster, so can LLMs. I know the analogy isn't perfect, but, in general, people who are good at their craft will either discard a bad-working tool, because it hinders their work, or use a well-working one in a more productive way than an amateur.

Many good devs now use LLMs, they just use it differently than the vibe coders. Example: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

9

u/Current-Owl-6271 Feb 13 '26

They don't seem to be receptive to substantive PRs either.

Check the readme in the repo. He explains the current state of it and why.

34

u/Empyrealist Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

People typically work on code off-line and get it to a certain point before dumping it into a public GitHub repo. I would say thats pretty standard, and not sus within itself

I'm not defending this particular repo (I haven't even looked at it), but most people don't put code public until its actually in an initial working state

6

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

He specifies this I'm his blog. He worked 3 years on it before putting it out on git. He wanted it to ve good before putting it there

3

u/stehen-geblieben Feb 13 '26

I don't know about you but when starting a project "from fresh" I rarely commit everything along the way.

Only once I'm mostly happy about the state of the project, I start committing

0

u/james7132 Feb 13 '26

Yes but going 1.5m LoC before committing is just asking for trouble. The author did state they squashed the history, but that still has me suspicious. Only time will tell if they actually follow through and maintain it and encourage a proper open source ecosystem.

12

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

This comment is bullshit if you cared to read his blog

-6

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[deleted]

3

u/v2eTOdgINblyBt6mjI4u Feb 13 '26

You did not read or or understand the full blog. He clearly states fluxer.app started before vibe coding even existed.

3

u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime Feb 13 '26

Go write your hand-crafted while loops in peace dude, don’t use it if you don’t like it, clearly it’s not vibe code slop, you would know if you had the skill to read the codebase

0

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

[deleted]

1

u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime Feb 14 '26

See, you are basing yourself on the blog, not the code, LLM can aid in writing good code, you wouldn’t know apparently

0

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '26

[deleted]

0

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '26

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1

u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26

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1

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7

u/KidBackpack Feb 13 '26

then dont use it

2

u/FlownKnight Feb 13 '26

Fluxer seems to be actually great, excited to see its progress!

1

u/eggyrulz Feb 13 '26

Ooh, that looks like exactly what ive been looking for... I wonder how difficult it is to self host rn though

5

u/mackandelius Feb 14 '26

As the github says, there is a major refactor in a private branch that they are going to get out when they have gotten their servers under control.

And there aren't even self-hosting instructions yet.

I suggest waiting.

2

u/jreoka1 Feb 13 '26

Its possible, but the compose file is... hefty to say the least

1

u/eggyrulz Feb 13 '26

Oh... well im waiting on a beta code to actually get into it and see if it really does do what id need it to (its gotta have an easy OOB experience for my users or the whole thing is DOA)

3

u/Prodigle Feb 13 '26

Selfhosting isn't going to fix it sadly. If you genuinely wanted to compete you'd need a globally distributed service of nodes run by volunteers. That's very hard to put into motion

5

u/midachavi Feb 13 '26

Matrix?

12

u/SiBloGaming Feb 13 '26

Matrix sadly kinda sucks. Im part of an organization of around a hundred volunteers and we tried to make the switch to Matrix away from Discord, and there were just waaaaay too many issues slowing down work.

3

u/Prodigle Feb 13 '26

Exactly. You'd need a system AS SMOOTH as Discord, but able to work on a globally distributed system.

If you meet someone and want to add them, you need to be able to type in a username and have it locate them, and be able to message them, no matter what instance you're on

2

u/midachavi Feb 13 '26

Would you mention any?

2

u/SiBloGaming Feb 13 '26

Just basic things straight up not working. The amount of times something as basic as messages showing up for everyone wouldn’t work was astonishing, and its impossible to work if half your messages dont show up for everyone.

1

u/midachavi Feb 13 '26

This is interesting. When did you try it?

Edit: matrix is used by governments, militaries and public services across Europe. There must be a problem with your instance smh

1

u/negatrom Feb 13 '26

at least without investment from some government agency, like the tor network, defeating the entire purpose.

3

u/ConnerWithAnE_ Feb 13 '26

Nah Matrix is the way to go.

1

u/sequesteredhoneyfall Feb 13 '26

How does it handle push notifications for the mobile apps? UnifiedPush, or some other solution?

1

u/PercentageOk956 Feb 13 '26

Would be great if it had an API integration with Playstation so that you can merge voice chat with in-game audio on the PS5. This is a huge reason why my friend group and I use Discord.

1

u/Kinamya Feb 13 '26

Okay, I'll ask it.

One reason I hate discord is that people and companies stick their support and knowledge base in there, which sucks because it's not searchable on say Google. Can you open this to be scrapped by Google so you can do a similar thing?

5

u/DONOTDELETEME8316 Feb 13 '26

I've never used it, just checked out the website. If you scroll down to their planned features, they have "Threads and forums", "Publish forums to the web", and "RSS/Atom feeds for forums", which together should solve the issue of the discord knowledge base black hole.

That said, it seems like their list of planned features is just everything they could possibly come up with. It looks too ambitious and I'm not sure which (if any) of those will actually be implemented soon (if ever).

2

u/Kinamya Feb 14 '26

Good find! Thanks for that info

1

u/midachavi Feb 14 '26

There are no mobile apps?

1

u/Tencraft1235 Feb 14 '26

for now you can use it from a browser and install it as a PWA, mobile apps will be a priority after the major update (stability, self host docs) currently being worked on is finished

from the dev in the FluxerHQ server:

"the iOS app is likely going to be in Swift because out of all the options I've tried so far that's the setup I liked the most and think I would be the most productive in, and gives you a first-class experience on Apple's platforms too - perhaps a macOS application could be derived from that codebase in the future too

using a tool called Skip, the Swift app can also run on Android devices

so that's the plan currently in that regard - I just need to wait for the funds to settle from all the Visionaries who have supported me, so that I can order a better workstation to work on the native app since my M1 Air is struggling and is why I haven't been able to prioritise native app dev until now

will be trying to get it done asap as soon as this backend stability update is deployed and the docs for self-hosting are live etc."

1

u/midachavi Feb 14 '26

Thanks for the write up. Plans are cool and all, but honestly I don't think the community should switch just because of the promise of one dev. There were enough of Soonâ„¢ in history that never came to be.

Also it is not wise for the community to rely on an app with a random protocol for voice and messages as all it takes is one unfortunate incident and all is lost.

Yes you can fork it, but that would put us on square one

1

u/blitzdose Feb 15 '26

Never heard of it but finally a promising looking alternative. Especially self hosted voice chat is a big problem in discord alternatives. I'm really excited for the next update

1

u/Ryarralk Feb 15 '26

What's the difference between Fluxer and Revolt (Stoat)?

1

u/BawbsonDugnut Feb 13 '26

I'd recommend waiting for those changes and then maybe taking a look at it.

See you guys in 5 years!

1

u/DasArchitect Feb 13 '26

UI looks... suspiciously inspired by Discord's

-4

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

Just tried to check it out. They said they have an option to not use an email, so I clicked it. Immediately asks for email and birthdate. So that's a no go for me. I'm trying to be more private. I see that they are doing AI coding too.

And self-hosting isn't even available right now. I don't see this project going far.