Fluxer

@hampuskraft wow, AGPLv3 is a choice! What's your thinking/strategy behind that?

@hampuskraft Explored this briefly and it’s refreshing to see such a focused approach. Congrats to the team!

@mykyta_semenov_ Thanks!

Fluxer is not end-to-end encrypted today. Some existing options, like Matrix, are both end-to-end encrypted and federated, but still fail to deliver the UX that people expect coming from platforms like Discord. Instead of starting out with complex features such as E2EE and federation, I decided to focus on what other OSS or OSS-adjacent options are criticised for lacking in terms of usability today, offering what I believe to be one of the closest public attempts at feature parity with modern chat apps such as Discord.

There's also a lot more coming, including features that make Fluxer unique. One example is publishing forum channels to the web to solve the content discoverability problem Discord/Slack has, where tech communities, for example, often use these platforms as replacements for an open web forum, making it more difficult to find content, which also could disappear anytime. I think there's room for innovation here: the familiar, easy-to-use UX of Discord (that no OSS alternative has really nailed) combined with ways to publish content to the open web, with Atom/RSS feeds, indexable pages, archives, and access without requiring a login.

So while I do care about E2EE, my priority right now is delivering the UX people expect, and hopefully an endeavor people are willing to pay to support financially, since not many are taking on this challenge. Getting Discord-level UX with E2EE everywhere adds a lot of complexity to an already very complex piece of software: I'd have to solve scalability for large groups, message history, lack of server-side search, account recovery, and deal with a generally slower UX. Some features may not even be feasible in a community chat app if everything is end-to-end encrypted. When Fluxer adds E2EE, it'll likely start with ephemeral private DMs with friends.

Designing the entire app around E2EE (or building in decentralisation via federation from day one) introduces whole categories of issues in terms of scalability, moderation, and UX, that I'd otherwise avoid. These problems would distract me from implementing features people want and it's part of why platforms like Matrix have ended up with a lot of frustrated users. That said, the fact that you can already self-host a Fluxer instance and control your data is an important first step toward private communications. The next step would be federation, its own massive technical challenge, so you can use one set of credentials across trusted instances and avoid having to context-switch via the in-app account switcher.

So yes: I definitely care about end-to-end encryption! But given the technical challenges for this type of product, and how much it can distract from the core mission, it has not been the priority so far. Being a one-person team has forced some tradeoffs, and I've had to draw the line in a few places just to keep the scope manageable. Still, I'm not opposed to implementing E2EE if there's enough demand, and especially if users want it enough to help finance its development :)

@mrrabbar The main thing open source community chat platforms lack today is basic feature parity with products like Discord. Until that baseline exists, people who care about privacy, data ownership, and free and open source software still end up on Discord or Slack. That is where everyone already is, and it has the features you expect from a community chat app, working reliably. Most alternatives suffer from poor usability, questionable licensing, missing features people assume will be there, or a self-hosting story that is too resource-heavy and complex.

There is already clear interest from this crowd. Early supporters have paid $299 each through the Visionary offering because Fluxer already feels polished and complete, and they want to back my mission to get it over the line: a fully decentralised, feature-complete alternative to the soon-to-be-IPO'd Discord. A place where you can host your own data and move between instances. That is the niche I'm targeting first, because these users are more willing to switch when a credible option appears. There's also constant noise on Hacker News about the lack of one.

My next move is a major refactor focused on self-hostability, alongside proper documentation. After that, I'll post to r/selfhosted and publish the full story and technical details as a blog post and on Hacker News.

That said, Fluxer already differentiates itself from Discord in a few ways:

• You can join voice from multiple devices at the same time, instead of having to disconnect one to use another.

• You can fully customise client-side CSS.

• You can save media so you can quickly find and resend any GIF, image, video, or audio clip you've enjoyed before, across all your devices (not just GIFs).

• You get personal notes for when you just want somewhere to jot down thoughts.

Still, feature parity comes first. Nobody will pay unless there's a believable path to the baseline set of features they expect, and no other alternative really delivers that today. That's exactly why I'm already getting compliments and payments from new users who don't know me. They can see the promise in Fluxer precisely because the baseline is already strong. In that sense, adding too many differentiators too early wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. The baseline itself is what is likely to drive me the most adoption from a technical audience, which is my initial focus.