I've been checking up on Fluxer today. If you've kept yourself up to date on Discord's 'teen-by-default' age verification nonsense back in February, you might've heard of Fluxer as a potential alternative to Discord. There was a nice blog entry on no-bull.sh that listed a number of alternative options and according to them Fluxer may end up being the best option in the long run. I could talk about the others, but given their lack of features and/or horrible user experience I'll only be focusing on Fluxer. I'd rather take my folks to something like XMPP but without the flashy stickers, custom emotes and desktop streaming it'll be a no-go. That's why Fluxer seems like the smartest option: copy what works.
So, Fluxer obviously got a lot of hype during the Discord ditch. We know Discord, and it looks just like Discord without the stuff we don't like (or won't miss). Fantastic!
But fast forward a couple of months and hardly any news has come out anymore. Discord appears to have withdrawn from implementing age verification (though many suspect they'll try it again sooner or later) so with the big scare receding everyone came back to Discord including me. Because what use is a communication platform that my friends aren't motivated to use?
Since March, there's only a couple of blog posts reviewing Fluxer and doing comparisons. They're generally positive, which is a good sign, but on YouTube searching "fluxer after:2026-03-01" (yes, you can use 'before:' and 'after:' with YYYY-MM-DD to filter by date!) only results in one video that has more than a couple thousand views. And as of the start of April, there is nothing at all. Nothing.
The GitHub page states that there's still a large rework in order. I think that is fair, you don't just whip up every single promised feature in two months just by gaining a lot of attention from the internet. The developer is apparently only 22 years old and started on the project five years ago, so he was only a child when he started. That might be concerning to some but from what I've read about them they seem good. Some people have pointed out that he's admitted to taking advantage of LLMs to help him with his work. Personally I think it's fallacious to say that just because a chatbot was being used in a process means the outcome must be bad. Chatbots are good at certain programming tasks and can help make the process faster in practice, to me taking advantage of that makes sense. I'll save the artificial intelligence discussion for another time.
Back to the project as it stands. Hype died down, development is sluggish with the refactor going on, but what I do hear about it seems cautiously optimistic. I will say that I do think Fluxer does something very effective that other alternatives just don't seem to like bothering with, and I've already mentioned it at the start of this post but I'll just hammer it here again: just taking what Discord does and not change a single thing that people are familiar with. If you want to move an audience to your competing platform you better make sure your users won't miss anything from the place they left, and the network effect ensures people will always have a good reason to come back to Discord if something's not to their liking and they stop thinking that Discord's invasiveness is a big deal.
Perhaps all the news is on Fluxer itself, but that's no way to encourage new users to join (besides I detest how walling off information within private communities has become the norm. What happened to public forums?). I just hope the project won't slowly wither and die off only for it (or another project that does something similar) to end up getting a sprinkle of attention again for a couple of weeks before people cave in once more and return to proprietary platforms because the perceived alternative is not done or it doesn't have all the bells and whistles they've come to expect from modern instant messaging programs.
This is more of a ranting post than it is a useful one, but I just wanted to write about something and Fluxer came to mind. Kind of bizarre how quickly the attention came and went. Hopefully the project will pull through because I would definitely want to take my friends with me there when it's got the all of the stuff that'll make them want to stay. But that'll be a tall order for Fluxer to pull off.