Fluxer looks like a promising app in the vein of FOSS replacements like Spacebar/Stoat, being a UI inspired by or cloned from Discord. Though seemingly it might lean more towards Freemium than FOSS.
I'm a little confused about the Pricing model, can someone clear this up for me please?
In the monetization model for Fluxer, on the main instance you pay $5/mo to:
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Unlock limits to things like the number of communities, message character limit, etc that are not limited by default on self hosted instances (?)
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Get features like "Custom video backgrounds, Custom entrance sounds, Custom notification sounds" that are enabled by default on self-hosted instances (?)
Or is the idea here that if you don't pay the dev $5 you don't get access to certain features in the self-hosted free software like video streaming features? (They are only in beta now)
im also curious about this app.. based on reading the devs posts it looks like the self-hosted version has no limitiations/all features, but the paid, hosted version has been created specifically to generate enough revenue to continue development.
that said, still looks pretty early as documentation is still in the works.. no real help for self hosters.
i say jump in, sink or swim!
The thing is if there are alternatives out there that are community driven, that's a much better option. I respect the developers plans for figuring out how to make this project sustainable for them, but this is a bad place to start from. Even Discord was less monetized at the start. These measures are no guarantee that enshittification isn't the path built into the foundation.
I really like this clone. My favorite that I would like to see succeed is Spacebar formerly Fosscord. That one is just about as stable as this but has a community behind it. Single developer projects can stall. Dev has a single life event and the whole ecosphere has to wait... dev never returns, etc.
IMO a happy medium would be if the software allowed self-hosters to monetize features to pay for the hosting. If you don't like it you can always self host.
Federated is the way to go surely. Both Spacebar and Fluxer have that in their long term roadmap.
uhg ive dreamed of this for the fediverse... we strive to be community driven, but in order to achieve that and keep the big pockets out we need an almost turn-key solution (hooks for known process services providers) for accepting donations or simple subscription management that allows server admins/communities to easily process the financial side of their instance.
adequate funding is one of the major hurdles to the side-scaling nature of the fediverse. even as cheap as it is to host lemmy on the lean side, you still see instances going down.