Fluxer kinda fucks?? Yeah, actually!
What it says on the tin, really. Enjoyer of alt-tech that I am, even before the whole age-verif bullshit, I’ve been trying different… “Alternatives” is a phrase I really dislike, but it’s the easiest way to clarify my point. It’s something I use every day, so I just want to pick the best thing. Same with my mail, same with my OS - as long as things function without much needing to be done from my end, sure! I’ll try it out.
… And when I say “try it out”, I mean I will litteraly transition my whole life to using that thing, regardless of if that may be a boneheaded decision. Started using Linux, got through the pains, now I’m doing better than ever in that regard, basically using my PC the same way I always have, sans some sticking points (d2d1.dll, for fucks sake). Did the same with mail, got through the hard part of manually changing addresses to throwaway garbage, thanks to alias addresses. So when it came time to open-source my chat client, a few options were obviously there, the main one I was taught about through other sites being Stoat (formerly, Revolt).
Bless their hearts - The application is nice, they’re doing a good job (specifically, shoutout Vale), and it being FOSS is awesome, but holy hell those updates are slow; plus, extremely slow app updates (they only recently got push notifs (I don’t really use them, but it’s good to know)). Used it for a while, but it was getting on my nerves due to a bunch of small things like that.
Then I tried
Fluxer
And my problems wern’t solved, but somewhat satiated. No mobile app, but compensated through actual screensharing. Even with audio, on Canary (to soon be pushed to main, along with many other bugfixes). Refreshes without issue, uploads things the way I expect, the media upload limit is generous, and the UI feels clean! Pretty similar to older versions of Discord (the ones that actually felt good to use), although I wish the Plutonium tab wasn’t in the Direct Messages section and was only confined to the settings menu. That’s what Custom CSS is for, I guess. That’s another thing to add to the list, custom themeing without having to use a third-party plugin like Venncord! Wow!!! :/ what a high bar, guys.
It’s not without flaws, however. Notably, I was hitting my deafen keybind on accident a lot, somehow. No idea how, but I just disabled the global hotkey and that was that. The only other issue I had was with voicechats and muting people - there is no mute option when you right click someone, only the option to change their volume %. Setting it to zero would be a nice equivalent, except when they leave and rejoin, their volume resets back to 100%. To dodge this, I would need to set people to 1% - barely audible, very easy to ignore. Kinda silly, hope that gets fixed soon-ish.
One of the things I look forward to that they’re hopefully pushing soon is proper federation, and not in the really dumb ass Matrix way, the way Bluesky did it. If all goes according to plan, I might actually increase how much my server costs in order to have enough storage and ram to have that available to myself, either that or finally lean on my old gaming laptop as a server. No idea, we’ll see.
There’s also someone making their own (mobile app), which they now call D-MAIL. It’s really simple but tbh I fuck with the simple layout of it more than the offically-sanctioned Stoatchat UI. Material You genuinely looks like piss.
Also, due to D-MAIL, I now no longer have a use for anything Google-related, thanks to it teaching me about Obtainium and how it works! Since using it, I can now install APKs via their offical websites/repos. It’s quite a handy way to sidestep Google Play (not that I will soon have much of a choice).
Depending on how bad that goes, I might go out of my way to replace my phone early. I only got my current one about a year ago, but I am more than willing to fight with my own money.