Several years ago I had a Discord community with hundreds of users. This was an IRL community, so it was very difficult to abandon but I did anyway. Tried to get people to leave but they were unwilling. So I handed it off to another member and deleted my account. Now that admin has contacted me again and let me know everyone is ready to leave. I found Fluxer yesterday while poking around #Discord on Mastodon and I think we’re going to end up there.
Fluxer is still very early in development and they have plans for many advanced features in the roadmap but it’s very feature-rich today. Current monetization plan is freemium + Patreon-like monetization. I understand that may be a dealbreaker for some but there aren’t a ton of other great options, and everything is open source, and self-hostable, and if you do, you get all of the premium features for free, while still communicating with the main instance over federation (in roadmap). That still leaves it susceptible to Mattermost-style enshittification but honestly rolling back updates solves most of those style of problems.
Keeping an eye on this. I got stoat chat up and running, and it’s great so far, but it was a big pain to get ruon my environment, it doesn’t have video calling yet or screen sharing, and it’s still using the Tenor API which just got deprecated some time in January 2026 so GIF search doesn’t work (I have vague plans to try and switch that to Giphy, and submit it to the team for review if I can get it to work).
The team seems to be working on their own solution to the GIF thing
Neat, I’ll keep an eye out for that; ideally they’ll implement something less centralised than Giphy. In the meantime I got their admin panel running in my environment too, by fixing the source, so Giphy is next on my list. I want my users to be able to do gif searches 🤷♀️
Klipy is probably a better option, afaik their api is a dropin replacement and the gif search is much better.
Legend, I appreciate the heads-up (👉ﾟヮﾟ)👉 I’m checking out the docs now!