The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best self-hostable, private (encrypted) and federated communication platform is XMPP/Jabber, which I recommend switching to as soon as possible.

Armed with an XMPP account, you will be able to log into any open Movim instance, which is an XMPP client that offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn't even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn't even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

odysee as much as possible

Just a heads up, Odysee became bankrupt after its parent company LBRY (owned by a hyper racist and fascist ancap who was trying to politically takeover New Hampshire with a right-wing libertarian community to, among other things, revoke child-labor protection laws before being kicked off the board for his racism) did a pump'n'dump of their LBRY coin without reporting it on their taxes, which the government sued them for since it was illegal.

Odysee was then bought out by Arweave; a blockchain crypto scam company created and owned by Forward Research, which itself is owned by Sam Williams; another venture capital crypto techbro libertarian/ancap who also bought a big NFT company during the Odysee aquisition. So unfortunately, Odysee is no better than Google.

Peertube is great though.

I'm actually kinda glad it has only 8gb for an odd reason; I hope it encourages devs to optimize their games more so they aren't locked out of the steam machine market.

**EDIT: **Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

Of all the discord clones, this one does look promising I must admit, especially since the dev has mentioned they'd be open to incorporating federation and some encryption abilities down the road. The GPL license is a good mark, and the dev seems pretty chill. Downside is that's it's still very rough and in more of a polished alpha state. The dev mentioned they're about to release a major refactor of the codebase, which they hope will fix the sluggishness the server is experiencing after an influx of new users from the Discord dumpster fire.

Personally, I'd still suggest Movim over Fluxer at the moment.

Movim already has a proven, scalable back-end (XMPP), it's already federated, already provides good encryption, has 90% feature parity with Discord such as Chats, group video calls, screen-sharing with audio (requires chromium browser to share audio for now), its made in the EU, and it's ready right now, not some time in the future (if Discord users fleeing discord try Fluxer, they'd be likely to bail on it due to the current bugs and just go back to discord). The Movim developer is also currently working on adding in discord-like channels and rooms.

But that's just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.

Isn't that just another centralized reddit clone like Voat or Tildes? The top/most active communities also aren't promising... Right-libertarians and Ancaps 😒

Not sure how that would be better than just spooling up another lemmy/piefed instance that allows for NSFW. The big advantage of federation is that the rest of us can continue on even if some instances like LemmyNSFW falter, where as if you ever decided to shut down goatmatrix, that's it, all of it is gone.

EDIT:

'Matrix is a free speech platform.

Uh oh...

But just like there are people whose idea of internet fun is complain-tainment, there are people who are on the internet for argu-tainment. Again. They should go elsewhere. I get it. It's fun for some people. But not every place needs to be a dive bar. Those exist on the internet. Go to them. And the last is similar to the others. I'm trying to find the best way to phrase it, but it is trying to show off how much of a worthless asshole you are. Sounds like an odd thing to do. But again, this is entertainment for some people, and if you don't show them the door, they will think the place is built for them. And if it is built for them, it can't be built for the folks at the top of the pyramid. And that's just who I want to build this place for.

So will these behaviors at the bottom lead to a ban? No. We are testing if a different model is possible. We will ask them to leave and make a conscious choice not value their kind of content. If you show up to someone's party and start messing up the place, and it isn't that kind of party, they are going to ask you to leave. If someone does, be a developed human being and just leave. In real life, manners would and should work. So why not the internet?

That seems... Very optimistic.

What behaviors will lead to a ban? Is it so free-speech that someone could start an openly white nationalist or neo-nazi community there? If so, that's how you get Nazi-bars (which is why Voat failed).

EDIT 2: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

EDIT: Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

Of all the discord clones, this one does look promising I must admit, especially since the dev has mentioned they'd be open to incorporating federation and some encryption abilities down the road. The GPL license is a good mark, and the dev seems pretty chill. Downside is that's it's still very rough and in more of a visually polished alpha state. The dev mentioned they're about to release a major refactor of the codebase, which they hope will fix the sluggishness the server is experiencing after an influx of new users from the Discord dumpster fire.

Personally, I'd still suggest Movim over Fluxer at the moment.

Movim already has a proven scalable back-end, it's already federated, already provides good encryption, has 90% feature parity with Discord such as Chats, group video calls, screen-sharing with audio (requires chromium browser to share audio for now), its made in the EU, and it's ready right now, not some time in the future (if Discord users fleeing discord try Fluxer, they'd be likely to bail on it due to the current bugs and just go back to discord). The Movim developer is also currently working on adding in discord-like channels and rooms.

(Movim also doesn't require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so I'd highly recommend quickly giving it a shot with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D)

But that's just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.

Hm, perhaps your instance needs to update to a newer version? I notice that it's on 1.4.6, while Piefed.social is currently running version 1.5.3

EDIT: Ah, nevermind, 1.4.6 is only a couple weeks old! I was thinking of the gap in those releases in relation to Lemmy's, where that would be a massive difference.

Is voyager updated to the latest release?

The second link in the body of OP is the dev explaining that he'd been working on it in his spare time for 5 years before releasing it as a public beta on Github.

He does mention using AI in a limited capacity.

Fluxer was largely built before LLMs became a normal part of day-to-day development. I do use them now, but in a limited way: as a rubber duck and for mechanical implementation work when I already have a detailed spec. I treat the code it outputs like I would any external contribution.

No LLM designed the system, wrote the specs, or made architectural decisions. That was all me. I only use LLMs when I already know the platform well enough to review the result properly.

Ultimately, you'll have to take my word for it that I'm trying to handle this responsibly. Fluxer is a large, complicated codebase because the project itself is large and complicated. LLMs still aren't capable of autonomously producing anything like what Fluxer is today.

If it were that easy to create something this polished on a whim using only LLMs, we'd already be swimming in credible Discord alternatives.

In short, for Fluxer: PRs should be reviewable, understandable, and test-backed. Submitting generated code you cannot explain, or using an LLM to bypass review standards, isn't acceptable. At the same time, responsible use of LLMs as a tool is fine, and contributors should not be harassed for using them.

Moreover, the OSS release began from a clean slate, so the public commit count doesn't reflect the full private iteration timeline, how long it has been deployed in production, or how extensively it has been tested. Going forward, what matters is that contributions will be reviewed, and tests will be required where appropriate. I also don't condone low-effort, unreviewed AI slop.

I published the project with a squashed history because the early work happened privately, and I didn't want to make 3,000+ messy commits part of the public record. I'm proud of where things are now, and the codebase has improved a lot over the 3+ years it was developed in private. Squashing commits during a closed source to open source transition is common practice, and it doesn't imply the project was vibe-coded.

This is my work, and it's hard-earned. If something seems too good to be true, it's because I've put real effort into making it good.

I get that in the age of LLMs, people are more suspicious and may assume bad intent behind every project. But some projects come from true passion and domain understanding. That's the case for Fluxer.

I could've built and maintained this platform without using LLMs for the mechanical parts of the work. It just would've taken about three times as long. At that pace, I'd need a full-time job to make a living, and then I wouldn't have time for Fluxer anyway. This is the world we live in, and sometimes compromises are unavoidable.

Starting with no money, the realistic options were to raise VC funding (since most people won't back a project like this until it's already close to what they expect), or to use LLMs in a limited, controlled way to speed up the mechanical tasks. I chose the latter so the project could stay independent.

If you feel conflicted about this, know that I do too. I'm happier writing code by hand. Going forward, LLMs don't need to be quite as involved. Now that I've released publicly, I don't necessarily need to work on this alone, and I've prepared the codebase to make it attractive to people who want to self-host the software.

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn't even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

Unfortunately Mumble doesn't allow for group video calls or screensharing. Personally I'd recommend Movim for people who require those additional features.

Good on you for leaving that mess!

Fluxer is very promising, but unfortunately it's a bit rough right now. Screensharing doesn't work, the server began to slow down from the influx of discord refugees, and overall it's all still rather buggy.

There is a major refactor that will be released at some point which will hopefully help, but until such time, you may want to give Movim a try, which has been in development much longer (since 2010). It doesn't require an email to create an account, and runs right in the browser so it's very quick to get into to test with a friend. The only downside is that it currently requires a chromium based browser (Chromium, Opera, or Vivaldi) to also stream an application's audio when screen sharing.

Most of you probably know this, but just a heads up, any comment I left in that thread that directly linked to piefed was not visible in a logged-out private tab, pretty sure Reddit is auto-removing anything with direct links to either lemmy or piefed.

Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

Many parts of Cinnamon were forked from Gnome 3 and Gnome 2 (Mate).

• XPlayer was forked from Gnome Videos (Totem)
• Xviewer was forked from Eye of Gnome
• Xreader was forked from Atril from MATE (itself a fork of Envince from Gnome 2)
• Xed is a fork of Pluma (itself a fork of Gedit 2)
• Cinnamon's compositor, Muffin, was forked from Gnome 3's Mutter compositor

Many other parts of Cinnamon are made from scratch, but it is not wrong the say it's also a Gnome 3 fork in many ways.

Davinci Resolve supports Linux natively nowadays, and the FOSS video editor Kdenlive is actually pretty impressive now as well.

I think we'll still get unoptimized crap, but it may sway some studios to consider that lower-end market. We'll never truly know how much of a difference it makes, but it will undeniably be another data point they'll have to consider in terms of potential profit.

The new Indiana Jones game straight up couldn't be played past the first level with 8gb of vram (and their forced ray-tracing made it require a beefier GPU to get playable framerates), and I'm always curious if that noticeably lowered sales compared to their projections by locking gamers with lower-end hardware.

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic because of the Unreal Engine monoculture

That is a setback, and I'm not sure how much can truly be done for a studio that opts for UE, other than limiting their game to an artstyle that requires a lower polycount, and perhaps reducing the amount of assets in areas like they used to do for older consoles, but I too doubt that'll happen.

EDIT 2: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

EDIT: Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

Of all the discord clones, this one does look promising I must admit, especially since the dev has mentioned they'd be open to incorporating federation and some encryption abilities down the road. The GPL license is a good mark, and the dev seems pretty chill. Downside is that's it's still very rough and in more of a visually polished alpha state. The dev mentioned they're about to release a major refactor of the codebase, which they hope will fix the sluggishness the server is experiencing after an influx of new users from the Discord dumpster fire.

Personally, I'd still suggest Movim over Fluxer at the moment.

Movim already has a proven, scalable back-end (XMPP), it's already federated, already provides good encryption, has 90% feature parity with Discord such as Chats, group video calls, screen-sharing with audio (requires chromium browser to share audio for now), its made in the EU, and it's ready right now, not some time in the future (if Discord users fleeing discord try Fluxer, they'd be likely to bail on it due to the current bugs and just go back to discord). The Movim developer is also currently working on adding in discord-like channels and rooms.

But that's just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.

Mbin went the route of making ensuring microblogs like mastodon were fully compatible, so it can offer both a Reddit-like experience like Lemmy and Piefed do, while also offering the ability to follow mastodon users and hashtags, and display mastodon content in a more micro-bloggy way.

The downside is few mobile apps support it.

Alternative link for the guide, since slrpnk is currently down for a bit.