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.

It's not a new standard. They didn't invent it. Different protocols often work better for different usecases.

This xkcd is more succinct than any tldr

Oh finally! This is fantastic news! Now we just E2EE for DMs at least.

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

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

XMPP and Matrix exist, “hey let’s reinvent the wheel”

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.

For which major OS there's no XMPP client?

https://colibri.social/ is a very similar project that uses ATProto

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.

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

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".

Matrix is aimed at enterprise sized organizations and it shows.

TempleOS?

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.

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.

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

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.

Matrix though?

Just tried out their official Android app. Doesn't seem vibe-coded at all. Very stable and high guality experience. Also the project began in 2023 (or even earlier) when LLMs were arguably still to weak for writing functional code, so at least it didn't start as a vibe-coded project.

I don't think they are comparable. Discord is built around communities (servers) with text and voice chats in one place, while Matrix is more about personal and group text chats. Spaces do exist in Matrix but they are not so convenient and there are no voice chats. I'd prefer Matrix for personal communication and Discord-like platforms for big thematic communities.

It's very hard to make a secure federated chat protocol.

The protocol itself is barely at a discord level now, next is discord level clients.

What setup doesn’t allow it?

If I new that, I wouldn't have an issue, all I know is that my Linux and windows desktops are unable to do it, so if I were to take myself as a sample, I would conclude that it doesn't work at all, which is what I used to go by when making posts until others were having good experiences with it. Nowadays most of the time when it gets brought up, I'll see roughly an even split of people for which it doesn't work and those for who it does, I surmise that there is some fundamental misunderstanding that myself and others have that causes this, but as of right now I haven't been able to figure it out.

Well leaving so many blanks, one can’t help you. Setting it up for my own instance was as simple as setting up web RTC. As for other instances, most including the flagship should have it enabled by default.

Their LLM usage policy is here ( https://github.com/fluxerapp/fluxer/blob/main/.github/LLM_USAGE_POLICY.md ) . They do not allow LLM authored code. The main dev does sometimes use it for rubber duck debugging according to an old post that I don't have the link for. One of the other devs says they don't use it at all.

Mostly because there's no Discord clone for XMPP and Matrix for the most time...
Atleast Movim (XMPP) and some other newer Matrix client are trying to replicate Discord features.

I wasn't aware of this policy. thanks for sharing!

Epic. I already moved to fluxer and use Fluxcord to sync my discord server. It's pretty solid