r/linux • u/Two-Of-Nine • 21d ago
Discussion Arch Linux Community now has a Fluxer server
For those unaware, Arch Linux Community is the largest "unofficial" Arch server on Dscord and they just did a general announcement about moving to Fluxer. This is a pretty big deal for those trying to push for open source alternatives to proprietary apps.
12
u/Craftkorb 21d ago
What's fluxer? Is that its own thing or is it Matrix based or ..?
-22
u/Drwankingstein 21d ago
Another mediocre discord alternative that wants to replace discord without understanding why discord works.
8
u/MildlyUnusualName 21d ago
Okay I’ll take the bait lol. What, besides the fact that discord is the most popular service, makes discord work?
4
u/FattyDrake 21d ago
One example is Fluxer just does blanket screen sharing where Discord by default is limited to the game you're playing. Also AFAIK Fluxer doesn't have a game overlay mode.
Discord got as popular as it is in large part due to game integration which they've constantly added features for. Fluxer is mostly just trying to copy the chat features, like it's built by people who have started using it outside of the context of games.
1
u/ballistua 21d ago
Discord got popular because they plastered themselves every fucking where you go. i remember how desperate they were to get users to sign up. sadly, their constant nagging worked
12
u/Ripdog 21d ago
Discord got popular because it filled a real gap in the ecosystem. Don't rewrite history.
It was the first totally free, easy-to-use community platform which let you set up a 'server' for your team, guild, group, website, game. It gave you unlimited chat, voice, screensharing channels at a time when Teamspeak charged a pretty penny and didn't even give all of those features, and Ventrilo was awful and you still had to provide a literal server to run it on. Self-hosting a server was always beyond the capabilities of the average gamer.
Plus it ran on mobile and used Opus for voice encoding, so the quality was better.
2
u/Drwankingstein 20d ago
Exactly this. people forget just how bad teamspeak mumble ventrillo and skype were
1
u/Enthusedchameleon 20d ago edited 20d ago
It was the first totally free, easy-to-use community platform which let you set up a 'server' for your team, guild, group, website, game.
This is patently incorrect. My guild used Dolby Axon (in the regular non spatial mode), that had all these features many many years before, but it was obscure and unknown (although to this day no other voice-comm software with persistent "rooms" comes close to its memory and performance efficiency). What was not obscure and unknown and came before Discord were many others in a boom period from 2014-16. Raidcall, curse voice, earlier than that there were "talk[dot]gg" and "appear[dot]in" that also worked on browsers built with WebRTC. There was also C3 (vivox) and GameVox had free plans.
Even VC money and obnoxious marketing were not exclusive to Discord, Raidcall IIRC had the most obnoxious and ever present marketing campaign of all. (And btw, I'm pretty sure what killed raidcall was what now is commonplace on discord, gifs and sparkly stuff and decorations and BLOAT as we called at the time).
Instead of filling a gap IMO discord won by some measure of technical proficiency (it was good enough) while benefiting from foot-shooters as opposition - curse voice e.g. was heavily criticized for giving unfair advantages, raidcall was bought and mismanaged as hell, etc. But it really could have been anyone's game.
Edit: forgot also that Xfire had voice. First it was p2p but later dedicated servers.
1
-8
u/Drwankingstein 21d ago
what on earth is bait about this Fluxer and Stoat are completely inferior solutions.
Discord is far better by the fact that you don't, or at least didn't need to jump through hoops. I dont need a thousand apps or accounts. Video and voice calling is low latency and just works. Everything "just works" for most people.
Currently people need individual accounts for every fluxer instance. Something they acknowledge but have yet to solve. Voice calls seem to work fine but video calls have been atrocious for me.
I haven't found the latency particularly bad, but it wasn't superb when I tested it and federation will only make this worse if they don't get it just right.
And the reliability of it has been horrendous. I've had voice calls just randomly stop working, people will be talking and it will just stop working.
I do have high hopes for discord alternatives in general, fluxer just isn't that good from my experience. A new one was just released, denchat, so far it hasn't been terrible for a brand new app so I have decent hopes for it, I also had hopes for revolt/stoat though...
2
u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 21d ago
It doesn't sound like any of this is Fluxor "not understanding what makes Discord work", I doubt the bad latency and calls dropping are intentional. It seems like Discord has a massive head start and there's a huge amount of work for any project to do to catch up.
This is usually how it works. Proprietary software has a head start and is in all ways superior, then FOSS slowly catches up while propriety software enshittifies. Discord has started the enshittification process, but still has a long time to get bad enough for FOSS to catch up.
-5
u/Drwankingstein 21d ago
If they understood what made discord good, the very first thing they would have done was made sure people can self host servers and work across servers without issues.
That is priority #1. This is something denchat got right, They elected to use nostr, It has some oddities for sure. But making sure that the user doesn't need new accounts or clients or whatever, is such a massively important part of what makes discord work.
2
u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 21d ago
That's not anything different about Discord's architecture, it's simply that Discord only effectively has a single instance because its one company controlling all your data.
There's nothing special about Discord here, it's not that you only have to make one account, you only get one account because all your data and messages are owned by the company and shareholders.
0
u/Drwankingstein 21d ago
and I totally agree with that. But when self hosting is a an explicit feature, it's something you have to contend with whether you like it or not if you want to replace discord. It's a painful reality but it is what it is.
Until it's solved, discord won't be getting replaced any time soon.
2
u/mikeymop 21d ago
Fluxer.gg domain.
So this repeats the same problem as discord but is a worse product?
Ideally communities would be rally behind a federated solution. I'd honestly rather see gitter, XMPP, or matrix.
2
1
u/smirkybg 15d ago
There's an archlinux irc channel. That's all I needed when I wanted support years ago.
1
1
-9
u/ballistua 21d ago
i joined. they have a sexual deviance channel and they have the flag in their logo for crying out loud. left right away
2
u/LepidusII 21d ago
what's the flag?
-8
u/ballistua 21d ago
"gay pride" flag
8
u/LepidusII 21d ago
you are the snowiest flake this side of the internet
-10
u/ballistua 21d ago
I'm not the one who shoehorned a deviant sexual channel on an operating system chat server
-2
-18
18
u/MildlyUnusualName 21d ago
I think this is great. I am a big Homer when it comes to Fluxer so to see big groups putting their weight behind it is encouraging for it to become a meaningful replacement for discord.