Fluxer – New Open Source Discord Alternative

Background

After Discord unveiled they would be rolling out a global age verification system (which was further fueled by reports regarding just how bad one of their ID validation partners was during the test rollout in the UK), an open source alternative called Fluxer was unveiled. Discord had partnered with Persona and well, please read this entire Ars Technica article about this (why Discord and the companies they partner with shouldn’t be trusted).

The disturbing note about Persona’s potential business dealings, is under the “Hackers probe Persona” section in the above linked article where researchers also found the uncompressed version of Persona’s frontend code was “exposed to the open Internet on a US government authorized server.”

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting—and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies

Persona’s CEO Rick Song had no choice but to make some statements to Ars Technica about this (confirming that at this time, the company has no Federal contracts). COO Christie Kim had to offer up even more reassurances that the company is not partnered with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), also adding there are no plans to work with these agencies.

Sure (sarcasm). The actions of the designs they were working on clearly indicated that they were developing such technology where they could bid for such contracts – they just got accidentally caught as both Discord and the companies they are partnering with (for ID verification), are being scrutinized more closely by privacy advocates.

The fact that one of the PayPal “mafia’s” tech bros (Peter Thiel who is also a co-founder of Palantir which is heavily involved in government surveillance systems (ignore the wordy corporate garbage version of what they say they do – I just cut right to the chase by calling out what their tech is being used for)) investment fund is a major investor in Persona, highlights the actual reality. Kim can say whatever she wants regarding his lack of involvement; many of us aren’t that naive to believe that crap.

Thiel along with Elon Musk and David Sacks (who has a high level position in this current U.S. regime) are collectively known as the PayPal mafia (Musk became involved by bringing money from his fathers emerald mining business to the table; these 3 have done a “bang up” job of damaging democracies around the world (all three of their families left South Africa after apartheid ended and were part of early PayPal – they are racially motivated in this techno-fascist movement that Musk’s own grandfather Joshua Haldeman had promoted in the 1930’s; Technocracy). Unlike Musk (who is a bonafide idiot that bought his way into relevancy and knows how to regurgitate info that makes him seem smart at times), Thiel is one of the key architects of trying to take down the existing world order and is dangerous in that regard.

J.D. Vance is also the real puppet they want installed to carry it all out by leveraging the power of the U.S. government (they don’t care if he has the personality of drying paint/doesn’t have any cult of personality; the difference between him and the demented sitting POTUS aka Pedo of the United States is that Vance would know exactly what levers that would need to be pulled). What once used to be in the realm of conspiracy theories, now has a good portion of the macro level objectives outlined in Project 2025.

I also make absolutely no apologies for stating that none of these companies can be trusted with your personal data or the public statements which they make. If they want to do it under oath, then maybe it might hold some degree of trustworthiness/weight. But we know that won’t happen unless these companies are facing some sort of lawsuit. Sure, Song engaging with one of those “researchers” is a better than nothing move (remaining silent would’ve only meant a silent admission while making these statements offers a degree of plausible deniability). I’m just not buying any of it.

Fluxer

Which leads me to the Swedish developer (Hampus Kraft) for Fluxer publicly announcing this open source Discord alternative that he has been working on for several years now. His blog writeup details that journey (I just hope that none of the discussions he has had with various inside sources/devs at Discord, will come back in some legal form since they will likely be looking over his source code to see if any of it infringes on their intellectual property). For those with the technical skills, a self-hosted version can also be setup.

He did an initial fundraiser that he stopped sales for since he reached 1000 funders for the Plutonium Visionary tier ($299). Plutonium is Fluxer’s version of Nitro; this Visionary tier was a limited time lifetime plan. Additionally, the project is taking donations. IMHO, he should’ve continued to run that Visionary tier so long as the demand was there (as the saying goes, need to strike while the iron is still hot).

The platform is currently in a “public beta” in the form of a web site (open in browser) and desktop applications for Linux, Mac and Windows. The mobile versions (iOS and Android) are still a work in progress. The real test is the infrastructure being able to handle the load as more begin learning about this and trying it out. If it bears out, I can see this gaining traction (there have been other clone attempts that just failed to gain any mindshare).

With all of this age verification drama, there is this limited window for Fluxer to get communities to test the waters and potentially move over (you need this critical mass such that it doesn’t turn into just another niche). I’m very familiar with how many users do not like change where they will stick to what exists no matter the negatives unless a point is reached where it affects them personally.

Other Thoughts

IMHO, one of the biggest mistakes for many of the old style forum platforms was to not counter Discord early on. phpBB for example had others who wrote chat modules that worked with their platform (there were even community portal frontends). phpBB is a simple but decent enough open source message board with the added benefit of being easy to install (pretty much just a few clicks). Self-hosting the server side of Fluxer looks to be more involved (not that I’m interested in doing that since I don’t want to be responsible for running such a setup for those communities I’m involved with).

Discord again had its roots in the gaming genre for voice comms (think raids in MMO’s or team tactics in various first person shooters) and better text chat than what most games could provide. It wasn’t designed for proper threading/categorization as a regular forum would be; it just had that type of ability and functionality thrown on top of that chat based design where it doesn’t do this other stuff well.

Where it turned into a “hammer” for all needs was when many gaming companies decided to use Discord for everything (eliminating their traditional forum messaging system). The explosion of text and voice chat channels in your typical server is just an outcome of trying to make it do what other platforms are better at handling. There were ulterior motives with this move by those publishers; it is notoriously difficult to index and archive anything on Discord and it is easy to bury comms because of the chat based messaging. Even it’s forum and threading functionality is atrociously terrible because it simply shoehorns that chat based design into the faux-forum setup.

Other types of communities ended up using Discord as an extension of the above because it is easy to get a community setup and running for free (since it is all running on the servers that Discord provides) and without having to sign up for hosting to install a forum software. But it is like using a hammer for everything. What is lacking (for Discord’s non-chat based designs) is the administrative and management tools (wake me up when it easy to move messages from one channel to another or having categories that look like actual sections for threads/topics specific to them).

Fluxer doesn’t address any of this since it’s an attempt to clone Discord (the chat and VoIP aspects). The main positive of this project is it being a serious rival to disrupt Discord (ahead of its planned IPO). Whether or not it can make a serious dent remains to be seen (part of me hope it does because I seriously dislike having to post anything on Discord now).