Alternatives to Discord

[arcus]

Fluxer v2 is out, along with a few other changes.

https://fluxer.app/blog/mobile-clients-and-fluxer-v2

Main changes:

• There's more staff on the project
• There's now a self hosting guide
• It's now on Flathub
• Alpha versions of the mobile apps have been released on Github
• There's now $1,500 (USD?) worth of bug and development bounties on Github
• Currently, there's work being put towards 1440p 60fps screenshare with no audio or frame drops, this is publicly available to test through the canary client

Federation is still in the works, but has multiple issues that need to be ironed out:

Why is federation taking so long?

We're working on it, and we need your input. Seriously, come talk through the design standard with the Fluxer team and developer community on GitHub and in Fluxer Developers. Federation matters to me and the entire team, and we want to do it right. A lot of questions are still unanswered:

•   What happens when a user keeps returning to one Fluxer instance through another instance?
•   How does Fluxer prevent illegal content like CSAM from propagating across instances?
•   In DMs, which instance is responsible for moderation, if any?
•   How do users and communities migrate between instances?
•   How should Fluxer handle Plutonium?
•   Why is Hampus a ghost?

And dozens more.

We'd really like to avoid the email problem, where some instances or clients never support newer standards, by being careful with the design upfront. Some split between instances is inevitable, but Fluxer shouldn't start there through rushed implementation.

We want Fluxer to be the home for your community for years to come, no matter who hosts it. That means putting in the thought and building slowly.

Edit: There's also a community run site for finding chatrooms, bots, and themes.

[arcus]

Continuing from the plurality thread: Matrix users, please try out the nightly version of Sable (Desktop and mobile versions are on Github), especially if you're plural. It's based on Cinny (the layout is similar to Discord) and it's currently the most feature rich client for Matrix.

It has:

• Online status
• Profile customisation, including banners, colours, status message, bio, and various custom fields
• Voice, video calls, and screenshare with quality options including frame rate
• An option to not send read receipts
• An option to not send typing status
• Custom themes using CSS, with community themes browsable inside the settings menu
• Custom emoji/sticker support and uploads
• A GIF button that searches klipy.com (similar to Discord and tenor)
• A button for recording voice clips
• Multiple image uploads in a single message (experimental)
• Various toggles for embeds and autoplay
• Privacy options to blur all media, avatars, or emotes
• Custom name colours, one for light mode and one for dark mode
• Pronoun buttons/pills which display next to names
• Multiple account support

But what sets it apart from other clients, and even other chat platforms, is the inbuilt support for personas: Sets of profiles with custom names, icons, colours, and pronouns tied to an account that one can send messages from. Unlike Discord with PluralKit, the support for this is apart of Matrix itself, so there's no bot labels and it works inside of direct messages. The developers working on the feature are plural and are working on integrating more of PluralKit's features into it (GitHub link) including front tracking.

Here's what it looks on Sable's end (and generally how it should look on other clients in the future):



And here's how it looks on a client that doesn't support personas:



The name prefix fallback can be optionally disabled, so it only shows the message on unsupported clients.

The current active persona shows in the chatbox, too:



And editing a persona:



I still have a few qualms with Matrix, but this client alone has made it my favourite to use.


One issue with it, is that one needs to manually generate encryption keys with new accounts. Go into Settings > Devices and generate a key (and save it somewhere) before chatting.