Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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What's Lemmy's opinion on Fluxer?
https://fluxer.app/
I love it and use it daily. Once it becomes stable, gets a docker container and documents the self-hosting flow, it will rule the universe.
You're not bothered by the plutonium stuff? Would you still host it if the plutonium features were still there in the self hosted version? (as in your self hosted instance paying them for plutonium on your servers)
I'm not sure what the reason for this theoretical is when it's already documented that self-hosted instances have full free access to the paid perks.
It's become pretty clear since all of this kicked off that none of the Discord-replacement hopefuls have the infrastructure to accept even the smallest fraction of users fleeing Discord. Paying for some nice-to-have features when using the official instance is at least a plan towards paying for that infrastructure.
Speaking on a more broad level, I find it more suspicious when services are free these days with no path to self-sufficient monetization. We've seen enough of those fall to venture capital influence at this point.
Thank you, that's a very interesting perspective. I wasn't aware of the plutonium thing.
That might be the stupidest fucking statement ever.
Your basically asking if unicorns shit gold would you take the unicorn poop.
It's nonsensical. It doesn't reflect the reality of the situation. Anyone can make up b******* hypotheticals to make something sound bad. It's still b*******.
Why the fuck would anyone give a fuck about the plutonium stuff? Kick starters, investment backing, and crowd funding are all standard ways to generate initial revenue. It's a f****** company. It needs money to buy hardware in paper server costs. Development isn't free and if you want people to work full-time on something you have to get this pay them.
He basically asked for $300k to start full-time development and Kickstart the company after he left closed development. He provided a full proof of service documentation in history of his closed development.
The only people who have any issue with the plutonium stuff are those who are either too f****** retarded to understand basic business or a too far up their own asses to think that everything should be free in life.
If you self-host you don't have to pay f****** wild concept considering how many self-toast services actually charge you money for full service. So that alone is already one up on a lot of stuff.
A basic subscription is far more reliable than donations if you want a company to be able to actually function. A subscription provides a reliable income so you can actually plan your costs and budgets. It's a far better option than microtransactions that discord seems to want to push.
Cuz again server costs and vitamin costs aren't free. Remember FOSS stands for free as in freedom to do what you want with the software within the license not free as in it doesn't cost you f****** anything.
If fluxer had come out of the gate with no proof of concept, no history. No explanation of the credentials of the developer. No business license and no source code on demonstration and just said hey. Trust me bro. I need 300 Grand then. Yeah it would be an issue. But lo and behold the reality is none of that's true.
Could it all go poof belly up and a month time 2 months a year? Yes of course, small businesses die all the time. 300K is not a lot of money for a small business. Frankly, the fact he only asked for $300k is more of a red flag than he asked for money at all. Cuz he's going to have to pull a lot f****** more money if you wants to do anything remotely clothes to what his goal is. If he had shot for a 500k 600k somewhere in that vicinity. I would personally be more trusting than him asking for $300k. Much more than 600k and I would start asking questions as that's a little bit much for a initial investment backing.
Seriously, the more I look around on Lemmy the more, I think that nobody here seems to actually understand that s*** costs money.
Weird to censor yourself like the swear words are the ugly parts of your long winded hostile rants.
You sound upset, you should talk to someone about that.
He's already talking to that machine of his that censors his drunken ramblings with cute little asterisks. I wonder what does that do to someone's psyque tho.
What I've seen makes me bet I could be dragging iso27002 out and marking all the rules it breaks. ..and the devs won't know what that means.
They're extremely new and open about what's missing though. Their plans apparently got somewhat thrown all over the place by the sudden extreme interest and quite a few things aren't yet in place (such as the self-hosting guide). Still works surprisingly well, and what they do goes into the right direction (no VC funding or investors, removal of the CLA, bound to GDPR, a full FOSS atack, etc).
I've seen this posted several times and this is the second time I've tried to access their self-hosting docs and get a 404. Where's everyone going for installation instructions?
Googling I got their docs and a github for running through docker, the docs which are empty, and the docker that has the help of claude code.
I try to not poo poo folks working on projects too much, but like why am I here over XMPP or Matrix?
That github looks like a fork of the original code. I never heard of fluxer so I can't really trust it since I've only ever heard people gathering opinions rather than reviews, a fork even less so. So for my honest opinion, it's a no for me since it seems like a very round about way to onboard anyone who wants to self-host.
Since we're here, I've tried giving stoat.chat a go and got it semi-working but the way they have the project set up, there's a lot of optional "bloat" that gets tacked on from the build.
What I had success with, was Continuwuity. Their docs were so good, I was not only able to set up chat but also new and legacy voice and video under 4 hours.
Yeah that is yucky, seems like self hosting hasn't really been at the forefront of intention for the project. From the looks of it, them being in Sweden it might have started as a "buy EU" sort of discord clone that was pulled into the death of discord conversation with the ID stuff.
Interesting times 🫠
Curious your thoughts on stoat, that came out of revolt correct? What sorts of bloat did you find?
4 is definitely a good benchmark for self hosting! lol Have you run Synapse, and how did that compare?
Sorry for the later reply, was working (oops, not really). From what I read, Stoat is just a rename of Revolt and the platform should really remain the same (when I had this up, some of the UI still read Revolt).
For the bloat, as a self-hoster (speaking for myself and not on the behalf of anyone else), you should try to be provided with the most direct solution to a specific issue. When looking at Stoat, and the output of the
generate_config.sh, they basically shove down a whole lot of solution at one time. There's from what I can tell, 15 different configurations for containers, over half of them are static versions and who knows how they all intermingle between the configs (Jesus, that's a lot of config files). This produces a monstrous web of configuration that I really have no time to digest and get working for something I'm just 'playing around with'. All this and I didn't even attempt to integrate voice and video. Also (as a nitpick) requires you to spin up caddy but has a config to point to that to a different reverse-proxy if needed (I already had nginx proxy manager and got this working but the whole thing fails if you don't spin up caddy. insert sad horse noises).This is where Continuwuity comes in, I have 4 containers that I have bespoke configured myself by reading the configs and 2 config files that I hand made based off the docs. I feel WAYYYY better at hosting this than Stoat. Even got the wife to help test the video and voice and it works great with Element. From start to end, took me 4-ish hours to be done.
I have hosted Synapse before and got it up and running but not with voice and video. IMO, it's a little bloaty as well (not nearly as bad as Stoat) but it's doable. Never attempted voice and video for this but again, Continuwuity is just much more straightforward and less overhead.
No worries, thank you for the detailed reply!
Sounds like a solid way to do it, and a support the uwuification of all software, so that's an extra bonus! Might have to futz around with it and see what sort of mess I can get myself into.
Because the people make the platform, and not the functions, and for lots of people you need a lower entry barrier, and the entry barrier for both of those is a good bit higher than fluxer.
Don't get me wrong, if matrix was a bit more convenient (easier to understand and to use like you would discord, and less bugs of which there are still a wide range of), I'd 100% advocate for it. But I can only tell my friends to use something if it's convenient enough that they will genuinely avoid a degraded experience.
That's valid, and I think I was coming off a bit of frustration from the previous comment I made in this chain. There are so many new apps that all try and build the features of discord, but always seem to base in closed protocols and so rarely use protocols that already exist, and with that add to the "15 competing standards" problem. Which is why I get much more excited by projects like Movim.
With all of that though, while I agree element has hiccups, XMPP has been around forever and is solid. We saw this with twitter migration too, the existence of other servers makes it seem more difficult, when that's not really the case. As this video shows, go to the place to want to sign up, give a user and password, confirm you're human, and use it. That's already less than the email confirmation of discord.
Now this is a question: how far can you get with xmpp? Could you build an interface on top of it to look exactly like discord with all of it's functions? Or does something like that already exist?
My first instinct with these older protocols is that there's no way they could support 10 people in a voice call with concurrent camera streams and 3 screen captures. I'm genuinely curious how far xmpp goes.
In theory yes, and Movim is movim' in that direction (yeah I invented that pun, blame me). That's part of the trick with XMPP, it's quite extensible.
XMPP is wildly extendable, my limited understanding is that Jingle is the extension used for this. From the abstract:
I haven't seen anything about the the extrema of the use cases like that, but Movim is working on building out many of the features of discord and it is built on XMPP.
Ok so when you're talking about xmpp as a discord alternative, basically movim is kind of what people should be paying attention to.
I'll def check that out. I am also passively observing progress on stoat.
It's a new project (as far as I can tell it just went public a few weeks ago) they have exploded in popularity in the last week and they are amid migrating their backed hosting provider ATM, they have been having service interruptions for the last couple of days
It's hard being the ~~popular~~ new kid. Thanks for the update!
The sentiment I keep seeing is that it's vibe coded, though the dev claims that AI was used but not in any core components. It's one I'll be waiting out personally, the whole huntarr situation has me pretty skeptical of any new projects
I think generally more positive than negative, but hesitant. There are so many different competing apps and discord copies that have risen and fallen, it's hard to really get attached to any that have little movement in fighting the network effect.
Seeing it already has the beginnings of enshitification with freemium features, while federation is "in development", particularly in communities like lemmy the question become why pick this over something that already exists and is an open standard?
Like looking at the "plutonium" page, it's clear they want to copy the features of discord nitro, and if we are to fight the network effect fight with the energy of discord's recent fuck up, I would rather land on XMPP or Matrix, if I have any push.
In other words, you are saying that there is too much discord in this space?
Down with discord!
I'm starting a new app called Concordance, and it will only bridge between different apps no matter where they are from 😤
Let me save you a few keystrokes, there's already an app called Matterbridge: github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There is a better, community maintained fork now: https://github.com/matterbridge-org/matterbridge
I've tried it. It performs poorly.