Shout out to Fluxer.
Still don’t think its quite ready but its chugging along and its been fun following the progress. I know they have some big updates inbound. Hopefully people actually give it a shot and flip over to Fluxer.
I’d also add that the “Proton” subscrition equivalent - “Plutonium”, is a better value proposition. But I will admit, they still need to clear a few hurdles before even I feel completely comfortable ditching Discord.
But its Open Source and it has a self-hosting option, along with the Quality of Life you expect from Discord in terms of the app layout, screen sharing, etc.
No.
What’s this supposed to mean? I’ve done similar things when restructuring my code. Git tries it’s best to keep track of files changing directories but sometimes you just go fuck it and abandon the history because Git is being a git.
I’d be more concerned about consistent 10k+ changes per day or something
10 million LOC addition in one month is not a red flag to you?
Meh. I’ve seen (and done) worse, honestly. Again would be more concerning if they kept it up
… What?
I’m incredibly productive, and have had the joy of working on productive teams. And unless they are working with hundreds of full time, high performing, engineers. You ain’t changing 10 million lines in a month.
With AI, it’s technically possible, but I can only imagine the slop. It’s likely incomprehensible at this point.
Just speaking from personal experience. Here’s a story.
One time I did a massive refactor, basically touching every function in the software. For background, this was a massive enterprise application. The backend was about 10 million lines of code, the front end was… probably triple that, I didn’t bother counting. Yes, building the code took more than an hour, even on extremely beefy machines.
The reason for this refactor was there was a huge amount of tech debt that finally caught up to us. You know, putting it off for years, using deprecated functions and old methods, feature flags, even forking software and modifying it to be compatible. Just years of finding creative solutions, until finally things said “enough” and there was no more bandaids. I was given the green light to fix up everything at once. Programmer’s wet dream, at least for me; I was so happy.
Anyway, in this project, we did rebase not merge. So, after 3 months of working diligently in a branch; I had to rebase the whole fucking thing because my coworkers obviously weren’t idle that whole time. This part I didn’t enjoy so much.
It took 2 weeks to rebase all the merge conflicts. It took so long, I had to rebase again. Multiple times. Each rebase getting closer and closer to being able to finally merge into master.
Finally I did it. I told everyone else to just relax and take the day off, while I merge into master and fix all the problems. There was many problems of course. But the final commit was tens of millions of lines of code changed, all by myself. This was before LLMs. But I have the type of brain that can sit there for 9 hours straight every day and tidy up code and enjoy it.
Edit: just to clarify, “rebase” makes it look like all those changes happened at once instead of spread out over months, and would make a huge spike like that. Also just because LLM wasn’t a thing didn’t mean I did it all manually… I heavily used find-and-replace, upgrade scripts, codemod, and many other automation tools. I think I even wrote a few manual codemod scripts to get it done.
For those interested you can find alternatives to Discord and any other software on AlternativeTo.net But here are some of the standouts I have found:
- Armada https://armada.buzz/: End to End Encrypted Messaging with Discord Import and similar UI, comms for gaming, Voice and Video Calling, and App and Desktop Streaming at full capability. No Phone # or Email required. Can be self hosted and is Open Source. Win/Linux/Mobile versions Ready to go now.
- Fluxer https://fluxer.app/: As the webpage states “Free and open source chat for friends, groups, and communities, with text, voice, video, screen sharing, and self-hosting.” and while functional, they have ramped up development to add guides for self hosting and mobile clients that aren’t released yet, and have an ambitious roadmap on their blog. You have to use 3rd party bridging apps for importing Discord Servers.
- Stoat (Formally Revolt) https://stoat.chat/: Another Open Source alternative that you can host your own, but at this time servers aren’t connected and they want to do it through Federation, or in other words like email servers, so users can browse public servers. They are early days on the desktop and video sharing as well but they users like it so much and development team is so reachable that donations more than pay for the community service and development. Uses an open web app so anywhere you can get a modern browser to work has access.
- VoltChat https://voltagechat.app/: A platform similar to the previously mentioned Armada, but using its own decentralized federated platform.
Going to add one more: Steam.
Steam has a built-in voice chat and chat channels for your friends.
It depends on what you are using Discord for and replacing. While Steam has Video Sharing and voice and text chat, that is only part of what I use Discord for and it would be lacking for me, not to mention it isn’t all available in one place in the UI. For others all they did with discord was make a text channel and a voice channel and used it and then Steam would be a drop in replacement that they already have.
