I spent quite a lot of effort getting Stoat up and running because they aren’t working on the selfhosted version, only to get a nice email from the German government that my server was running an outdated version of React with RCE vulnerabilities. Nuked that stack at 3am.
Also I fixed their Tenor integration to be provider agnostic so the self-hoster could choose a different gif provider like klipy (Tenor turned off their API so gif search in Stoat is broken), tried to contribute that one small change back to the main project, immediately rejected because “we have no plans for klipy support”.
Did you guys also consider Fluxer? I tried Stoat first, but the main instance is really slow and there are some video features disabled due to high cost. Which is totally fair.
Fluxer seems to have more features and their main instance is a lot snappier. They’re also accepting donations via Plutonium. Which seems to be helping with the server costs.
Both are AGPLv3, with Fluxer recently saying they’re gonna remove their CLA so that it’s true Open Source.
Yeah, I guess you’re right actually. You pay money and get more features. I tend to think of subscriptions for Open Source more as donations, but Fluxer is a little different.
But, yeah, like someone else said, you can self-host and not pay anything and get access to everything. Did I mention it’s fully Open Source without a CLA?!
It is, and that makes it much better than Discord, but currently they’re mostly building another monolith on the central instance. Self-hosting doesn’t mean much if the communities are all on there.
I’ll wait for federation, hope it comes soon. Till then, I see more potential in Matrix.
Worth noting that the Plutonium subscription of Fluxer is irrelevant if you self host - you will have all features available and unlocked for free.
For me this sounds like a perfect compromise. “Discord Nitro” style monetisation is effective and compelling and like it or not a true competitor needs a revenue stream from somewhere and I have serious doubts about the viability of donation-only monetisation at this scale.
In my eyes, the only sensible way of building such a platform at scale is having it be federated. Otherwise you can host a server - and if you’re unlucky, might need accounts on five servers to access all the groups you want.
If their federation implementation comes relatively prompt and is workable, that’s great. If not, it feels like a way to bootstrap a centralised alternative to discord. Pre-enshitification discord, but it’d again be up to a single entity whether it stays that way.
I don’t mind paying for hosting, but I don’t want to jump from one centralised platform to the next.
Federation is on the 2026 roadmap for Fluxer, and while I’m sceptical they pull it off in that timeframe Hampus (the developer) has stated it to be a high priority for the project. Fluxer is also open source, which Discord never was. If it takes off and Hampus goes evil corpo it can be forked.
Stoat seems to be the one my friend group is most interested in, currently I’m waiting to see which one is better in the next couple of months or so.
I spent quite a lot of effort getting Stoat up and running because they aren’t working on the selfhosted version, only to get a nice email from the German government that my server was running an outdated version of React with RCE vulnerabilities. Nuked that stack at 3am.
Also I fixed their Tenor integration to be provider agnostic so the self-hoster could choose a different gif provider like klipy (Tenor turned off their API so gif search in Stoat is broken), tried to contribute that one small change back to the main project, immediately rejected because “we have no plans for klipy support”.
Not worth the effort, IMO.
Stoat has to fix their self-hosted version before I’ll touch it again.
Did you guys also consider Fluxer? I tried Stoat first, but the main instance is really slow and there are some video features disabled due to high cost. Which is totally fair.
Fluxer seems to have more features and their main instance is a lot snappier. They’re also accepting donations via Plutonium. Which seems to be helping with the server costs.
Both are AGPLv3, with Fluxer recently saying they’re gonna remove their CLA so that it’s true Open Source.
They are selling a subscription. It isn’t really a donation if you pay a set price for services.
I’d also hold out to see their federation implementation before considering them as viable as matrix.
They do seem better than stoat, though.
Yeah, I guess you’re right actually. You pay money and get more features. I tend to think of subscriptions for Open Source more as donations, but Fluxer is a little different.
But, yeah, like someone else said, you can self-host and not pay anything and get access to everything. Did I mention it’s fully Open Source without a CLA?!
It is, and that makes it much better than Discord, but currently they’re mostly building another monolith on the central instance. Self-hosting doesn’t mean much if the communities are all on there.
I’ll wait for federation, hope it comes soon. Till then, I see more potential in Matrix.
Worth noting that the Plutonium subscription of Fluxer is irrelevant if you self host - you will have all features available and unlocked for free.
For me this sounds like a perfect compromise. “Discord Nitro” style monetisation is effective and compelling and like it or not a true competitor needs a revenue stream from somewhere and I have serious doubts about the viability of donation-only monetisation at this scale.
In my eyes, the only sensible way of building such a platform at scale is having it be federated. Otherwise you can host a server - and if you’re unlucky, might need accounts on five servers to access all the groups you want.
If their federation implementation comes relatively prompt and is workable, that’s great. If not, it feels like a way to bootstrap a centralised alternative to discord. Pre-enshitification discord, but it’d again be up to a single entity whether it stays that way.
I don’t mind paying for hosting, but I don’t want to jump from one centralised platform to the next.
Federation is on the 2026 roadmap for Fluxer, and while I’m sceptical they pull it off in that timeframe Hampus (the developer) has stated it to be a high priority for the project. Fluxer is also open source, which Discord never was. If it takes off and Hampus goes evil corpo it can be forked.
I’ll be interested to see their implementation, though it likely won’t replace matrix for me.