Fluxer: A chat app that puts you first
fluxer.app
Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

Asking because I value opinions here.

Personally I don’t think anyone can influence what the general audience of chat users ultimately coalesces around. That’s going to happen, and it’s going to be out of anyone’s control as people discuss and compare and decide which they prefer of the dozens of alternatives appearing.

This however looks interesting to me. I know it’s not Matrix and thus not secure like everyone here wants. But it is fully open source and it is AGPLv3.

It feels like it’s getting some traction and interest. If it has problems that anyone here can spot (besides the full encryption which isn’t something the rest of the discord users looking to leave are going to demand), I am interested in hearing them.

  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Good license choice (AGPLv3, the best there is for online services), good code of conduct (for example explicitly protecting things like gender identity and expression of contributors), but effectively headquarterted in Sweden (new NATO member state, member of the Fourteen Eyes, and a government pushing backdoored-encryption laws).

    I think the lead dev’s heart is in the right place, but by an unfortunate accident of geography it can’t be immune to NATO shenanigans. Whether or not that’s a dealbreaker is up to the individual.

  • Snort_Owl [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    Honestly i’ve been enjoying steams group chat functionality thus far and don’t really feel the need to use anything else. But i only use voip to talk to close friends I’m not a big discord server user.

  • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    21 hours ago

    I think the XMPP-based attempts at replacing Discord are the best bet. Movim is working on Spaces (the XMPP extension for being Slack/Discord) and making good progress.

    • peeonyou [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      i hate matrix… its an unintuitive mess. we need more of an IRC type experience rather than that jumbled mess of whatever its trying to do

      • lapis [fae/faer, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        I don’t understand this take, I have two matrix accounts in different servers and have played with a handful of clients, and the only issues I’ve run into have been either of my own making or due to impatience.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      24·
      22 hours ago

      Not an experience that is ever going to find mass appeal. It’s good for security but it’s not going to get wide adoption like this.

      I am not looking for the most secure one, I’m looking for what’s most likely to get adopted at scale. I have ruled matrix options out. What matters is community adoptions, subreddits that make a discord, twitch streamers that make a discord, patreons that make a discord, youtubers that make a discord. The next app that is mass adopted will be determined by these communities coalescing around an alternative and making the switch.

      • lapis [fae/faer, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        9 hours ago

        realistically, they’re mostly going to grumble about ID verification but ultimately stay on Discord, for the same reasons people are still using the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

        I will say, every encryption issue I’ve encountered has been fixable either by giving it a moment to think or by restarting my chat client, which isn’t too different from when Discord has periodic blips.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          2·
          7 hours ago

          I don’t think so. Groups that want to chat go where community leadership determines they go. If people want to participate in the x twitch streamer’s off-stream chat they are forced to go where that community decides to be. They do not have to follow an audience by going to discord, they make the audience go where they prefer. They don’t get the audience from discord, discord gets the audience from them.

          For this reason chat programs are uniquely vulnerable to people going elsewhere. They have no inherent audience of their own, they are not social networks, they are tools and they can be replaced by another tool at literally any moment. People will run discord and an alternative side by side until they can drop discord altogether. That’s exactly how other chat tools died historically as well.

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      22 hours ago
      • matrix uses a security protocol that sometimes has an absolute meltdown, leading to people not being able to see or send certain messages once the encryption breaks. Good for secure messaging (because messages stay encrypted), but it is frustrating to deal with, and will turn people away (including me).
      • element doss not support multiple accounts and has no plan to do so. I hear that other apps may support it, but I’m not sure what the current status of that is.

      Messaging particularly benefits from a smooth UX and I think matrix has accepted certain trade offs for the aspects it’s strong in.

      • lapis [fae/faer, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        Matrix’s UX has a bit of friction, but that’s the cost of an open, federated, encrypted platform where you own your own encryption keys. Every closed-source, centralized alternative is very much a “trust me bro” situation when it comes to message encryption and backdoors.

        Element sucks as a client, I always recommend FluffyChat or SchildiChat to first-timers. On desktop/web, Cinny and Commet are fantastic options for people who want a Discord-like UI.

      • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        21 hours ago

        I’m not an engineer or programmer so I’m ignorant, but I use Delta Chat as a Whatsapp replacement and its 500x less friction than Matrix when it comes to usability but also security. Everything is encrypted by default and it leaks much less metadata. I don’t know what it is about their encryption implementation, but everything works in Delta, so I’m left to wonder what is their problem that they can’t get a handle on this and also implement basic features people have asked for for years? When they do put them in, they make boneheaded decisions like defaulting to your camera on for Video Calls and no option to change defaults for on/off. Zoom has been sitting right there to copy these things from. If Signal is encrypted in any meaningful capacity and not backdoored, it also doesn’t have any of the encryption issues Matrix users seem to run into.

          • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            2·
            9 hours ago

            If anyone is checking it out, I recommend Arcane Chat for Android. It’s from one of Delta developers but it’s their own frontend. I use it on my phone and the regular Delta flatpak on my computer. Never any problems syncing.

        • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          15 hours ago

          Right that’s the vibe I have too. I’ve heard deltachat is a decent replacement for self-hosted messaging.

          Edit: after reading more about deltachat, it seems like it is pretty well suited to being Hexbear’s main messenger instead of matrix, no? It is almost a Signal replacement where I don’t need a phone number to sign up.

          I might give it a go, but it sounds like it isn’t a replacement for a heavy duty messenger like Discord/Slack, unforuntately.

          • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            10 hours ago

            I would say it’s more of an instant messenger replacement for something like Signal or WhatsApp. I migrated all my family to it from Signal. I mostly brought it up to mention that it really seems like the Matrix developers are bad at their jobs when other apps are out there that don’t have the UI and encryption problems Matrix has.

  • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    22 hours ago

    This looks interesting, everything seems to be published at first glance. This feels like a project that would be years in the making especially since its now competing for user share against matrix and discord.

    While there is a company set up, this does feel like a bus factor of one project which can be a point of concern. I don’t really care about the LLM usage since the author clearly acknowledges the guardrails. For a project of this magnitude I’d probably (from the perspective of a discord user) want to see communities shift over first (like the bluesky and mastodon migrations) which will probably occur in tech communities first at this point. All in all, I wouldn’t say it would be foolish to test run this but it’d have to be done with the expectation that it could be temporary.

    Note, try to get out of the habit of calling things “open source” as the term doesn’t accurately describe the actual state of the work and ends up being a marketing buzzword whose social currency changes based on who youre speaking with. I like using the word “published” because it then evokes the feeling of scientific research rather than technical jargon (open source relies on an audience knowing what source code is)

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      22 hours ago

      This feels like a project that would be years in the making especially since its now competing for user share against matrix and discord.

      Yes I think the dev says on one of the about pages this was 4-5 years of solo work and what they believe to be the “closest to feature parity with discord” of all open source offerings.