Shout out to Fluxer.
Still don’t think its quite ready but its chugging along and its been fun following the progress. I know they have some big updates inbound. Hopefully people actually give it a shot and flip over to Fluxer.
I’d also add that the “Proton” subscrition equivalent - “Plutonium”, is a better value proposition. But I will admit, they still need to clear a few hurdles before even I feel completely comfortable ditching Discord.
But its Open Source and it has a self-hosting option, along with the Quality of Life you expect from Discord in terms of the app layout, screen sharing, etc.
Shout out to Matrix, which is federated, self hostable, open source, and supports end to end encryption.
Matrix is a bit of a shit show and also isn’t a discord alternative to begin with.
Matrix is a bit of a shit show
How so?
and also isn’t a discord alternative to begin with
It absolutely is. A “Space” is the equivalent to a Discord “server”. It’s not perfect and polished, but it does the job. I’ve been using it rather than Discord with my gaming group for a year now.
No.
Holy fuck!
hmm I thought they leaned relatively against AI slop. Wouldn’t this be because they were working on it privately or something for quite some time?
It’s 11 million lines of fucking code. 11 MILLION LINES.
Open source is the way. It always amuses me when people move from one proprietary system to a different one, since the new one always ends up having the same issues.
That’s because privatized companies spend money to promote their products while open source largely grows through word of mouth. The average person doesn’t know about the issues of proprietary software nor the existence of an open source alternative, they just use whatever everyone else uses and everyone else ends up using whatever gets successfully marketed.
The new one usually won’t have the same issues at first, but they’ll have the same opportunities and motivations that lead to the issues. People will see a different provider and say they’re not doing the bad things, and they’ll be correct for a few years maybe, but then it becomes a struggle to get them to switch to the next thing. This whole problem would mostly be solved with open-source alternatives instead.
I’ve been eyeing Fluxer for quite a while now. Once they roll out the update where they want to overhaul and streamline the selfhosting part, my friends and I are going to switch
It’s a slop project.
Is this substantiated?
At this point for many projects it’s now depressingly, a matter of degree.
Look at the git and tell me. One guy, contributing 1.5m lines of code is not human made. It’s a matter of time before it falls apart and becomes unmaintainable.
The way age verification is being pushed feels more like wanting to setting up checkpoints on the edge of a city versus just checking Id’s before going into a specific establishment.
I just don’t see how this isn’t a national login system trying to masquerade itself in a poorly fitting “think of the children!” sheep’s skin.
I recommend Stoat, it can be selfhosted, open source, there is no shady company behind it, and it works well. There even is top-notch noise filtering, which I found very important for voice calls.
isnt stoat russian?
So what? It is open source and you can self host it. I don’t think open source software developed by Russian people is worse than open source software developed by Americans.
Do they have voice calls now?
Um, they answered that in the second sentence of their comment.
Part of me thinks is this just performative nonsense that will always have enormous holes in it, like Prohibition.
Scanning “your” face to prove your age is really just scanning a face.
But I also worry about successive noose tightening.
Nah. They want to be an essential service for games.
Verified users of appropriate age.
Integrated game chat.
Integrated game VoIP.
All appropriate-for-age.Can’t develop your own moderation? Just pay discord.
So many companies will pay massive sums to outsource chat/VoIP/age-verification/moderation to discord.
And discord is already the “goto” gaming community provider.Oh, and shop stuff.
Gift (buy) a friend a cool cosmetic through discord. Already has the community connections. Just needs the reason for games to tightly integrate it (moderation, chat, VoIP, age verification).It is absolutely a positioning move
Part of me agrees and the other part thinks it’s going to go the way of the automobile.
Everyone needs a license, issued from big brother, to use the public service.
Or else!
People using Discord badly are very unlikely to kill random bystanders.
We could go back and forth all day on this, but just watch out for the government trying to claim “you need an ID for this because the anonymous people online can hurt you”.
They’ll find a way to justify it, by some string of twisted logic that makes it equivalent to killing someone in an accident. It’ll probably be about protecting the kids, it’s always about protecting the kids.
Oh well, I think we’re on the same side here. I joined the EFF!
Yet the entire software community depends on it for everything
I really don’t understand how a chat app for gamers became so big in the software development community. It’s such a poor choice, especially for support. Nothing is indexed in search engines, and people can’t see messages unless they join. I’ve even seen some projects use Discord for bug tracking. It’s woefully inadequate for that.
My impression—I don’t use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.
You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn’t require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.
And it didn’t cost anything to set up.
If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I’d probably use, oh, Mumble. I’d get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I’d only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I’d have to go cobble something together from other components.
It annoys me that a lot of Actual Budget stuff is on their Discord. Thankfully they have documentation on github and their website.
Because it has a lot of good tools for finding what you need on an intuitive platform focused around communities similar to Reddit.
Let’s be real Discord is popular because it does a lot of things really well.
it has a lot of good tools for finding what you need
As a moderator and the primary troubleshooter for a 12k member discord server, no the fuck it does not.
new user joins
Hey, how do I X?
It’s in pins.
new user joins
Hey, how do I Y?
It’s in pins.
new user joins
Hey, how do I Z?
It’s in pins.
Kill me. Or bring back old-school forums. One of the two.
What your talking about has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with stupid users never reading or using resources available.
Same way 1% users actually read server rules.
The users found the Discord because they searched for their problem and the result was a recommendation to join the Discord.
If the answer had been indexable by search engines, the search engine would have found the answer and given it to the user. No need to even log in.
I would posit that if the tools don’t make the resources readily available and obvious (like a pinned forum thread that you literally have to scroll past to make a new thread), then the tools aren’t good.
Yeah, I know a couple of mods whose servers are in a bit of an uproar.
The “unofficial” Arch Linux discord server is inviting/encouraging their members to move to their Fluxer instance. Hopefully that’s a trend that will start.
Fluxer has been an adequate replacement for Discord for my TTRPG group. Been using it since March and it has gotten better every month.
I have no illusions that they may one day become as shitty, but for now it works. And the fact that it’s open source and self host able gives me some hope.
Just spent 10 minutes fooling around with fluxer via the web ui. Was able to invite a dice bot, but couldn’t get it to respond. (Also it’s very D&D-specific, but that’s a separate complaint)
Looks so much like Discord
Yeah it’s pretty unashamedly a Discord clone.
Since it is opensource and self-hostable, there will always be some non-shitty fork around once it gets popular. At least it is very likely.
Ngl the fact it cannot be found on F-droid is very suss. Beta on mobile is Google Play only…
The mobile app has been their main focus past month or so. It just came to the app store beta literally yesterday, before that you had to download the apk from their github. It’s come a looong way and is extremely usable.
Their website told me how to build it through obtainium so not as sus as it could be
My country was getting age verification before the others but yesterday it just stopped for me, no idea why
Isn’t this their third attempt?
