Hey all,
I believe OP had the best intentions here, because I hadn't really advertised the fact that self-hosted instances are a thing nor did I have documentation for it, at the time OP posted this. I've been doing the work to make the codebase ready for self-hosting with very minimal requirements through a huge refactor for the past month.
This is highly unfortunate. The context for why a lot of people are discovering the platform now, even though I haven't announced or released the next big update yet, is because it spread like wildfire through word of mouth from Bluesky and onto other places on the internet, following "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month" (The Verge).
A big update is coming soon that will make self-hosting documented and readily available to everyone, where you get to decide how limits are set on your instance, with the default being that the Plutonium subscription doesn't exist and everyone gets the same limits and unlocked features that Plutonium users get on the hosted Fluxer.app instance.
I'm open to feedback around things like these for the Fluxer.app instance, however, but I decided to start out very close to Discord Nitro in how the pricing was structured such that I could gain goodwill by making some features free when I can subsidise it by other revenue streams (businesses paying for isolated Fluxer instances as a SaaS offering, commercial licensing of the codebase, donations from the FOSS community, and potentially creator monetisation on the Fluxer.app instance down the line).
Fluxer absolutely wants to give you full freedom, and I've tried to make improvements where I could over Discord's Nitro offering for the hosted instance that I provide (which isn't free to provide). There are more ideas floating around to make the free tier more powerful to get you a taste of freedom without jeopardising my ability to monetise the instance to continue on the fully FOSS development of this platform and continue prioritising self-hosting.
TL;DR: Things may change as other revenue streams emerge, but I've chosen a defensive approach for now so that I can instead make some things more generous down the line on the hosted instance of Fluxer if I know this works out.
I'm going to be closing this issue as not planned for this reason, which I hope you can understand and I hope the self-hosting aspect is something you'd like to see as well, and I'll continue working on this big update.
For clarity, here's the pending blog post that I haven't yet shared widely because the update isn't live yet, along with the roadmap and pending release notes:
Thread
Comment by Hampus
- https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/
- https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
- https://blog.fluxer.app/p/9da0129f-ae60-424b-931d-963f7c3484a0/
Thanks!