An unexpected but welcome update, the Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!, which puts it back in the running.

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

Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: there’s a huge red flag; 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.

I see. Does the crypto aspect of Odysee and its new NFT-liking owner concern you at all? If not, have you seen this video?

I’d recommend this well presented short talk on it to get a quick rundown :)

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.

tbh, I feel like it’d be easier to just build up XMPP further at that point since the XMPP devs would welcome that with open arms, as opposed to a hostile fork with the Matrix devs.

literally choose your client to use to join the server, it should be possible at some point. servers that can accept other clients, even self hosted clients.

That is what XMPP, which Movim uses, allows today. There are many XMPP clients available that can all federate and communicate with each other, and anyone can self-host an XMPP server. I’m only pointing people to Movim since it is the most full featured client and keeps things simple (which is very important when onboarding new less technical users).

If you mean that truly all services should federate, like even Matrix, Signal, etc… that’s technically possible if every company and developer agreed to a single standard, but practically impossible as they will never agree to that single standard for various reasons (NIH syndrome, lack of control to create profit or lock in users, ego, legitimate different use-cases, etc).

Yeah matrix needs a refactor or fork.

I wouldn’t really trust a refactor if it was from the Matrix team. An outside fork I’d be okay with, but it’d probably break compatibility to fix the problems I have with it, possibly introducing fragmentation, which could get dicey.

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

Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the group who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement.

Fluxer does indeed look very promising. If they can effectively pull off federation and encryption as the dev plans to do, I think that could be a great platform. Based on their more in-depth post about their background, they seem to have the talent to pull that off.

SimpleX I don’t have any experience with, though as you say, it’s covering a different use-case (I personally went with Deltachat for that type of app, which has been working really well).

I only heard of and became an XMPP user within the last two years, I have no nostalgia for it. I do, however, believe it to be the best federated and encrypted communication platform due to its maturity and constantly improving feature set.

The only other federated option we have is Matrix (which I’m not a fan of for multiple reasons), and in the future Fluxer.app, which looks promising but is very much still alpha/beta software and is reliant on the developer getting enough funding.

Every other Discord-like communication platform is centralized and offers no encryption, which I don’t see as a good idea to adopt in our modern political climate. Having a single point of failure is, IMO, just kicking the can down the road until we need to switch to something else again.

They don’t really need to understand the federation to use it in practice, same as here on lemmy, and same as email. Most people don’t actually understand how email works or that it’s federated, they just know to put the right @domain.com at the end and it works for them. If you attempted to explain how email works to someone, it’d sound really complicated and off-putting to non-techies too, but if they know just enough to make it work, it seems simple.

I’d only explain it to people who are curious enough to ask about it. Otherwise, all anyone would need to do is just direct new users toward the Movim site, create an account (no email required, just a username and password), and bam, they’re up and running right in their browser and can start connecting to friends. All they need to know is a username or the name of a group, which is in the exact same format as email so it’ll already feel familiar (Person@domain[.]net, or InterestingHobby@domain[.]com).

Since it doesn’t need an email and works right in the browser, it’s really quick to try. Why not give it a shot with a friend for a bit to see if it could work for you?

As I said, the discord-style server/rooms are currently being worked on. After which, it should functionally be pretty much 1:1 with Discord. The only thing it’d be missing is the Forums feature, but instead it does have a pretty cool blog feature :)

I imagine XMPP’s ease of use has likely increased since the last time you used it, probably best not to judge it on such an old experience?

Currently none of the Discord alternatives have anywhere near the install base that Discord currently has, and many of the direct clones are so new they have literally none, like Fluxer. If an existing network effect is a requirement for the people trying to leave Discord, than they will be trapped for a very long time.

Movim does, and recently landed screen-sharing application audio too (must use a chromium based browser for now to stream the audio too).

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.

Matrix I agree with, as I didn’t have the best experience. But Movim makes XMPP pretty simple to use. Did you have a negative experience with Movim specifically?

Stoat is missing video calls and screen sharing, both of which Movim has while still being federated and encrypted.

There isn’t really any other option that is federated, has video calls and screensharing, and offers encryption besides Matrix/Element, which I’ve personally had a lot of usability problems with, and it’s encryption has a concerning metadata issue and thus I don’t really recommend it.

Not sure where a user would need admin help with Movim, it’s pretty slick and user-friendly. I consider it the best working alternative that’s using a proven back-end technology that we currently have available.

All other centralized alternative Discord clones on the market are generally still in an alpha or beta-stage, don’t offer encryption at all, and use unproven back-ends that may not be able to scale to a large user-base. Where as the Movim client has been in development since 2010, allows for federation (like lemmy/piefed) to scale up, and is ready to use in the here and now.

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