I mostly lurk here, and I know we’ve had this discussion come up a number of times since Discord’s age verification changes were announced, but I figured this video offers value for the walkthrough and comparative analysis. Like me, the video authors aren’t seasoned self-hosters, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Stoat and Fluxer both look appealing to me for my needs, but Stoat seemingly needs self-hosted servers to route through their master server (unless I’m missing something stupid) and I replicated the 404 for Fluxer’s self-hosting documentation seen in the video, so it’s looking like I’m leaning toward a Matrix server of some kind. Hopefully everyone looking for the Discord exit ramp is closer to finding it after this video.
Yes, Fluxer’s self hosting documentation 404s, and Stoat seems to still rely on a central server, which isn’t self hosted enough for my needs. It’s cool that both of them are looking good in the near future, but I want something I can start using in the next few months.
When did you last check the self-hosting documentation? I just poked my head into it and there’s a big post talking about why they’d rather people wait on self-hosting.
That said if you liked Fluxer but are not satisfied with it right now (which is completely understandable. It’s in beta, after all, not a finished product), I’d say check back in 2-3 months. I would bet that the self-hosting is ready to go by then, judging by the rate of how other things have been updating.
I believe it was from their GitHub, which is where GamersNexus checked as well. I did subsequently find their blog post. I’m new to self-hosting, and it is taking me longer to learn some crucial pieces of it than I thought, so by the time I’m ready for it, self-hosting for Fluxer may be up again. That said, the only thing I really need Fluxer to do that it looks like Element doesn’t do is screen sharing a game window, and I’m preparing to be able to set up Owncast or something to stream to if that’s the only thing my Discord replacement is bad at, so Fluxer doesn’t have to be my only option.
Welcome to self-hosting! I hope you have fun learning stuff. I’m still kind of on the lower-end of the intermediate scale myself, so I’m hoping they’ll be using dockers and docker-compose once the self-host docs are up.
Right now I do think it has screen share, but it doesn’t allow you to share audio at the same time (known bug). Bummer for me too.
I’m just glad that Discord pushed back their age verification stuff for at least a few months so there’s room for Stoat, Fluxer, etc to get some work done.
Yeah, same. And I’m currently scratching my head on Docker right now. I downloaded a Jellyfin build that was not labeled unstable but is still considered an unstable version, and go figure, everything is behaving correctly now that I’ve actually identified the latest stable version. But I’ve also got three containers, one of them a bespoke version of Jellyfin provided by my NAS manufacturer, and of the other two containers, I can’t figure out yet how to upgrade in place so that it uses the same users and settings from the other container. So that’s where I’m at, haha. After that, I need to figure out how and why SSL certs work and how to set that up, and then I’ve got a lead on exposing that to the internet via WireGuard, a cheap VPS, and a cheap domain name. If I can get all that working, I figure I’ll be ready for hosting something besides Jellyfin on my local network only. And yes, the clock is ticking until Discord becomes a problem.
Honestly if you’re that worried about it, I’d just wait and not use anything. Instead of wasting time trying to find a product that probably won’t get better, you can wait and get Fluxer when they make it ready.
Or you could pull stoat and modify the code yourself.