An unexpected but welcome update, the Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA, which puts it back in the running.

EDIT: The Fluxer dev has agreed to remove the CLA!

Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: there’s a huge red flag; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

I see. Does the crypto aspect of Odysee and its new NFT-liking owner concern you at all? If not, have you seen this video?

I’d recommend this well presented short talk on it to get a quick rundown :)

odysee as much as possible

Just a heads up, Odysee became bankrupt after its parent company LBRY (owned by a hyper racist and fascist ancap who was trying to politically takeover New Hampshire with a right-wing libertarian community to, among other things, revoke child-labor protection laws before being kicked off the board for his racism) did a pump’n’dump of their LBRY coin without reporting it on their taxes, which the government sued them for since it was illegal.

Odysee was then bought out by Arweave; a blockchain crypto scam company created and owned by Forward Research, which itself is owned by Sam Williams; another venture capital crypto techbro libertarian/ancap who also bought a big NFT company during the Odysee aquisition. So unfortunately, Odysee is no better than Google.

Peertube is great though.

literally choose your client to use to join the server, it should be possible at some point. servers that can accept other clients, even self hosted clients.

That is what XMPP, which Movim uses, allows today. There are many XMPP clients available that can all federate and communicate with each other, and anyone can self-host an XMPP server. I’m only pointing people to Movim since it is the most full featured client and keeps things simple (which is very important when onboarding new less technical users).

If you mean that truly all services should federate, like even Matrix, Signal, etc… that’s technically possible if every company and developer agreed to a single standard, but practically impossible as they will never agree to that single standard for various reasons (NIH syndrome, lack of control to create profit or lock in users, ego, legitimate different use-cases, etc).

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

As I said, the discord-style server/rooms are currently being worked on. After which, it should functionally be pretty much 1:1 with Discord. The only thing it’d be missing is the Forums feature, but instead it does have a pretty cool blog feature :)

Movim does, and recently landed screen-sharing application audio too (must use a chromium based browser for now to stream the audio too).

EDIT 2: The Fluxer dev agreed to remove the CLA!

EDIT: Just a heads up to anyone interested in Fluxer: I was just informed today of a huge red flag for Fluxer; it has a contributor CLA that could allow it to change to a non-FLOSS license in the future. I was hopeful for it previously, but that kills it for me.

Of all the discord clones, this one does look promising I must admit, especially since the dev has mentioned they’d be open to incorporating federation and some encryption abilities down the road. The GPL license is a good mark, and the dev seems pretty chill. Downside is that’s it’s still very rough and in more of a visually polished alpha state. The dev mentioned they’re about to release a major refactor of the codebase, which they hope will fix the sluggishness the server is experiencing after an influx of new users from the Discord dumpster fire.

Personally, I’d still suggest Movim over Fluxer at the moment.

Movim already has a proven, scalable back-end (XMPP), it’s already federated, already provides good encryption, has 90% feature parity with Discord such as Chats, group video calls, screen-sharing with audio (requires chromium browser to share audio for now), its made in the EU, and it’s ready right now, not some time in the future (if Discord users fleeing discord try Fluxer, they’d be likely to bail on it due to the current bugs and just go back to discord). The Movim developer is also currently working on adding in discord-like channels and rooms.

But that’s just my 2 cents. Fluxer is one to keep an eye on for the future, though.

I’m just working with Adobe maybe to my own detriment haha.

Have I got a video for you :p

I’ve also not followed anything on the gaming side, I heard it’s way better than what it once was

It truly is! In some cases (with AMD cards) it can even out-perform windows. For the most part most games just work without tweaking thanks to Proton being integrated into Steam, but unfortunately competitive online games with anti-cheat can be a no-go if the devs haven’t enabled Linux support (still, even there we have some surprises, like Hunt Showdown enabling it).

Davinci Resolve supports Linux natively nowadays, and the FOSS video editor Kdenlive is actually pretty impressive now as well.