Fluxer

Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP chat app built for friends, groups, and communities. It ships as native desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and a web app, so conversations follow you across devices. The interface will feel immediately familiar to anyone who uses commercial community chat platforms: servers with text and voice channels, roles and permissions, invites, emojis and stickers, webhooks, and discovery listings.

What sets Fluxer apart is licensing and hosting. The source is published under AGPL-3.0-or-later, and the project documents how to self-host a complete instance from this repository: one Docker Compose stack that brings up the web app, HTTP API, WebSocket gateway, admin dashboard, uploads, search, and voice signalling on a single machine, with LiveKit handling voice media. The docs include system requirements, backups, upgrades, reverse-proxy configurations, and a bundled Caddy setup that obtains TLS certificates automatically.

The client experience is keyboard-driven and polished, with platform-specific installers (including signed repositories for Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Flathub), push notifications, multi-factor authentication, message search, and a gift economy funded by donations and in-app cosmetics rather than subscriptions. As a free alternative to Discord, it covers the same core use cases — community chat, voice channels, and moderation — while letting operators own their instance and their data; against Slack or Microsoft Teams it trades enterprise integrations for a consumer-friendly, community-first design.