Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

Lobsters is a community-driven platform for sharing and discussing links to articles, tutorials, and projects related to technology and programming. Readers can learn about a wide range of topics, from software development and system administration to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. With user submissions, comments, and voting, Lobsters provides a platform for collaborative learning and knowledge sharing among technology enthusiasts.

Lobsters

A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative. The platform uses Erlang/OTP for real-time messaging (inspired by Discord's architecture), Cassandra for write-heavy workloads, and TypeScript for the backend. Self-hosters can use SQLite instead. The project is AGPLv3-licensed with a freemium hosted instance, accepts donations, and offers paid support. Federation is in development. The author discusses technical decisions, LLM usage for mechanical tasks, challenges with native apps vs Electron, and the goal of staying bootstrapped without VC funding.

How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app

<p>This is amazing! Can’t wait to see where this goes.</p>
