I don't like the idea of plutonium subcription

Current problem

seems like just a copy / reskin of discord with every flaw at the time, there are many other apps that offers whatever nitro was offering for free, if plutonium is the same as nitro, there's no real reason to switch to fluxer, just look at guilded chat, it was a 1:1 clone of older discord version with their own version subscription, it died and anyone noticed

Proposed change

changes to subscription model to make a visible alternative rather than a clone if paying for plutonium offers the same benefits as nitro, and being a free user has the same restrictions as in both, there is not much reason to switch apps since most of my friends already have the other app nitro was already hard to sell, and I had to be convinced by a friend to sign up to fluxer, seeing the same limits really made be not want to use it more than I need to

Additional information

removing paid subscriptions is not necessarily the only solution if you offer free things that is locked by nitro, there could be others premium features to make up for it if discord offers 480p video calls with 32 people for free and 1080p@60 for nitro, maybe offer 720p@60 with 8 people for free as an alternative rather than competition if discord only allows 10mb files of any kind for free users, maybe allow images and video of 200mb to be auto compress with lowered resolution

1 comment

mesubMod 1 vote 1h ago

Hello, and thank you for your feedback. It should be pointed out that, in many cases, the free tier of Fluxer is a lot more generous than the Discord's free tier. Infrastructure and staff time is not free, so there does need to be a sustainable way to keep main instance going, as well as fund staff time to advance the FOSS mission. There was a similar post (which is not public), that had the following response from Hampus (most of this still applies to your post):

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.

If you're able to describe your alternative funding model in detail, the team would be happy to consider it where practical.