cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/40562232
From Fluxer’s updated roadmap on their website
See the polyproto website they linked here
I hadn’t heard of this protocol before, but the possibility of transferring accounts between homeservers sounds exciting!
Here’s the text from the screenshot:
Federation lets people on different instances talk to each other as if they were on the same service, the way email works across providers. Fluxer’s federation will be based on polyproto-core, a specification from the polyproto project, with our own extensions on top. polyproto is still young, and we hope that building a real implementation of it, and sharing what we learn, helps the specification mature and benefits everyone else who builds on it.
polyproto-core describes an identity that works across servers. Your identity is anchored on your home server and looks like name@domain. Behind it is a certificate that your home server signs over a key created on your device. To prove who you are to another server, your device signs a challenge from that server, so one identity works across servers and you don’t need a separate account on each. Messages are signed by the sender, so a server you visit can’t forge messages from you without being detected, as long as your home server and your device haven’t been compromised. The specification also defines how to move to a new home server.
polyproto-core is an early beta specification maintained by the Polyphony project. As of October 2026 it is at v1.0-beta.13. It focuses on identity and leaves message formats and chat features to extensions. We’ll write our own extensions for Fluxer’s features and propose changes to the protocol where they would help others too.
We’ll publish an experimental draft pull request in 2026 that you can try and give feedback on. The stable release follows in 2027. Until the draft is up, the discussion happens in Fluxer Labs, and you’re welcome to join in.
You can already sign in to several instances from one app. You sign in to each instance separately and switch between them. The mobile apps already support several instances and accounts, and the desktop app gets the same in early October 2026 with the update described in #2.
You must log in or # to comment.
Is fluxed vibe coded?
https://fluxer.app/blog/how-i-built-fluxer
The main dev has maintained that Fluxer is not vibe coded. Whether or not they’re completely AI-free though, I’m unsure of. But at the very least they didn’t just ask Claude “give me a discord like chat app” and then shove that onto the internet.
I’ve never been overly interested in fluxer, cuz matrix is much better than discord imo so I’m very happy with that, but polyproto is by far my fav federation protocol so this is super exciting anyway
matrix is much better than discord IMO
These two things just aren’t directly comparable. You need an application to use Matrix, and there are only a handful that support all the features and of them, only a couple are stable and of those, none of them have a good (or any) UX for onboarding or administration or for channels with a large membership.
Element is the poster app for Matrix, but its clearly made by and for the people who design the protocol. Why do channels get an unread indicator when someone changes their name? Why must I see every time a user joins or leaves a room with no setting to turn it off for large rooms? Why can’t I turn off unread indicators for a room I really don’t care about constantly staying up to date on? How does the app even allow people to sign in without verifying their device cryptographically, so the app can announce to everyone else that they are an incomplete user? I can go on and on. I’m really liking Sable so far as an alternative, but it is constantly breaking and still suffers from some of the same issues as they’re just bound to the protocol.
I use these apps, I like them, but if they’re better than Discord to you then I’m happy, but you’re an edge case.
Sorry, you didn’t deserve this rant. Please forgive me. I hope fluxer (and matrix of course) does well and I am interested in how polyproto ends up working for it.
Personally my use cases for it are talking one on one to friends via text + voice calls + screen sharing, private (small) groups of friends, and occasionally keeping an eye on public spaces of projects I like. For those uses it’s been perfect for me, and much less frustrating than discord ever was. Even using vencord to unblock the streaming bitrate + disable as much bullshit as I could, discord was always a constant frustration to me with their incessant begging and nagging to get nitro or whatever else. Matrix just works, consistently and well imo, and I can say whatever I want to friends without a corporation having access to all of it. I’m sorry you haven’t enjoyed matrix, but as a lifelong discord hater matrix is everything I wished discord was back when I used it
It’s not a new standard. They didn’t invent it. Different protocols often work better for different usecases.
I don’t know if activitiyPub or ATproto are well suited to real time messaging. Surely they have a reason to chose a different approach
https://colibri.social/ is a very similar project that uses ATProto
This xkcd is more succinct than any tldr
Oh finally! This is fantastic news! Now we just E2EE for DMs at least.
On the roadmap as well:
Fluxer will add end-to-end encryption to personal notes, DMs and group DMs. It will be required, with no setting to turn it off. We’re building it on MLS (Messaging Layer Security), an IETF Standards Track protocol published as RFC 9420 in July 2023.
Communities, the large public spaces with moderation and search, are not part of this plan.
polyproto, the family of specifications behind our federation plans in #4, includes polyproto-mls… We will most likely build our encryption in line with it and help finish it.
The timeline is the same as for federation. An experimental draft that you can try arrives in 2026, and the stable release follows in 2027.
https://fluxer.app/blog/roadmap-2026#5-end-to-end-encryption-for-notes-dms-and-group-dms
something something competing standards
there’s already Sable, which is feature complete as a discord replacement (discord-like guilds, voice/video, roles, etc.) and already has mature federation and E2EE features on account of it being a matrix client
I do personally use Sable and Matrix to chat with some of my friends. I think it’s really cool. However, I don’t think it’s user friendly enough for mass adoption. There’s so many clients but none of them provide an ideal experience.
I send a voice message from sable to my friend using fluffychat on mobile? they can’t listen to it.
I try and call my friend through sable? their mic/camera doesn’t work and my screen share is a black screen.
No client I’ve seen allows you to favorite emotes or stickers
As far as I’m aware mobile clients simply don’t support calling
Videos just don’t play on my sable desktop client.
Maybe there’s solutions to these issues, but if each new user is expected to troubleshoot things like this, Matrix is never going to become widely used. I’m excited for Fluxer because it seems like it could really become the frictionless experience that Matrix isn’t
sable also does calling just fine, including on mobile. issues with fluffychat aren’t really relevant to me because i’m not recommending anyone use fluffychat, but frankly i don’t really see how it’s a bad thing that you can still communicate with some level on someone who might prefer some other client over not having the option at all.
yeah my Sable client just doesn’t show that. Though it shows that star icon as “Steal Sticker” in the right click menu. Not the same as favoriting.
I wasn’t aware Sable had mobile clients, but it seems like it’s only available on sideloaded app stores on iOS. Automatically a dealbreaker for any friends/family that has an iPhone probably. I’m not in the EU so it looks like they’d need to go through a whole process of installing something on their PC and using a VPN on their phone just to get the app store…
As far as Matrix clients in the Apple app store go, I’m only aware of Element X and Fluffychat, and since Element X didn’t support custom emotes/stickers when I last checked, that leaves Fluffychat as their only option for a mobile app. (Please don’t try and suggest web apps, no one wants to actually use those)
spaces arent aren’t really like guilds, there isn’t a mobile client with ux parity, matrix is a messy protocol, and there isn’t account migration
sable’s mobile client has UX parity, and spaces are presented pretty much exactly the way guilds are on discord in sable. y’all seem to be judging sable based on element’s reputation.
oh I hadn’t seen the sable mobile client, it’s pretty good! still unfortunately a matrix client though and spaces still aren’t really guilds. I used cinny a while back and it does the same kind of layout but it doesn’t really fix the underlying architecture. it’s serviceable but not really a drop-in replacement. plus polyproto is goated, been waiting a while for a proper implementation of it
The masses need a simple drop in replacement. Fluxer could be that. Matrix isnt.
sable is absolutely that
I’m sorry. It absolutely isn’t. It’s a nice Matrix client though.
I’ve never had a good experience, nor a discord-like experience with anything matrix-related. Tried sable just now and it looks to me exactly like any other matrix client. Nothing that I care about in discord is there.
You say it’s “feature complete” but from my POV it’s fundamentally different enough to create constant friction and frustration. Discord communities/“servers” is a very different concept than a matrix room. Maybe my grandma would mistake the two as being same, but certainly not me.
Fluxer does not have that issue, it is a real 1 to 1 discord clone and was already closer to discord a year ago than matrix is now or ever will be due to core protocol design decisions.
rooms aren’t the analog to guilds, spaces are. spaces in sable are presented exactly like discord guilds, down to having manual categorization. did you try it for all of two seconds or something?
Maybe my grandma would mistake the two as being same, but certainly not me.
condescending af. again, nobody is conflating these things except for you. matrix’s analog to guilds is spaces, a feature you presumably didn’t try in the handful of minutes you could have tried sable in between my comment and your reply.
It doesn’t look like this at all for me. Maybe it’s an issue of mobile web client? I went to the website and logged in. I don’t see a plus like on discord to join servers or guilds so I assume there is nothing like that. I only saw the rooms I am in on matrix and it looked pretty much like the othet matrix clients I use.
Your screenshot looks way more like discord.
But so does fluxer and I found it less confusing and more immediately obvious to use compared to this.
there’s an actual mobile client for andoid and iOS and it works fine
There’s a lot of hate for matrix, and I think it usually boils down to people using a client that doesn’t match their use case, or having tried the protocol while a certain “necessary” (for them) feature was still not accepted as core in the protocol. This leads to them writing off the whole stack as “bad” and prevents further discussion.
E.g. I think until we get Canonical DMs merged into the spec Matrix will always be a bit rough around the edges for new users.
Shame that people refuse to move past things like that, but - hey - maybe the next vibe coded discord replacement will be just what we need!
Fluxer was mostly built before LLMs
Sorry I already use Flumuxer it’s on the omniproto website.
XMPP and Matrix exist, “hey let’s reinvent the wheel”
They both have existed for a very long time, and yet people flock to Discord by the millions. Why do you suppose that is?
they corralled to it like they’re corralled to piefed, facebook, etc.
Matrix is aimed at enterprise sized organizations and it shows.
As far as I am concerned, fluxer fills the niche of the bridge between open protocols and discord for normies. Xmpp doesn’t have clients for all major OS’s and matrix is finicky if you care about the voice and video side of things.
XMPP clients: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_XMPP-Clients
?
We run matrix voice and video calls daily on a self hosted federated instance. It’s a non issue.
The biggest issue I’ve had with element calls specifically is no audio on screen shares, they keep claiming it’s fixed, but there are a lot of setups that don’t allow it, of which mine is included. I don’t know if other call protocols have better luck, but fluxer has been solid for it since I started using it.
For which major OS there’s no XMPP client?
Disclaimer: I host and use XMPP. I like using it.
That being said: the question isn’t if there’s any client, the question is if there’s a good client.
And my god, do XMPP clients suck ass. At best, they’re decent (monocles comes to mind, for example), but I actively loathe interacting with Linux desktop XMPP clients. There’s not a single one that is competently designed, or rather, they are all so fucking bare-bones and ugly looking.
“But that doesn’t matter!” yes it does shut the fuck up.
99% of the population doesn’t give a shit if you support the latest OMEMO spec or are written in memory safe rust or whatever else.
It takes a a fraction of a second to realize “this client sucks” and at most an additional minute to figure out “…and it’s not suited to my use-case”.
I also host matrix and use it extensively on all my devices. There actually are nice clients, and even some Discord-likes. But a) the protocol is so horrible, I’m not sure reinventing the wheel can be called a bad thing, and b) I want to cry once a week at least when using it. Why do my old messages not load today? Why does my message show as sent two weeks ago (!), but only arrived now (!) despite having sent plenty of messages both directions in between? Why are all of my messages marked as “can’t verify authenticity” on about half my devices, but not the other, a bug that has been open for YEARS with hundreds of complaints and pleas to at least reduce the danger-signaling indicator since it indicates “insecure!” to non-expert users, with zero maintained response? And this is just for myself, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck supporting matrix for friends & family. I mean, I am doing that, but fuuuuuuuuck thaaaaat.
Fluxer allows us to tell friends and family “here try this, it’s just like discord but no corporate bullshit!”, and they can open the app and go “oh yeah that is like Discord. Ok, sure, we can try using that instead”.
TempleOS?
