The Gamers' Tavern

It's been a few months since we decided to move to Discourse, after all the Discord sketchy ID verification and AI stuff, leaving our “original home”

If you're new in the Tavern or have been living under a rock – which trust me, is completely fine and, given the actual world situation, scoot over and let me join you – you may be interested in reading To Discourse and beyond

We had to say goodbye to some, we had to hear others grumble, we had to discover how to manage a community in a forum-first environment, with a chat on the side, coming from a community in a chat-first environment and a forum on the side.

It wasn't easy, but it was necessary to protect members who held a lot of friendships and value from The Gamers' Tavern community, but didn’t want to have to sacrifice their privacy and values in order to maintain this.

Fortunately, we weren't the only one shaken by the AI and Age ID shenanigans by Discord. Many developers raced to get an alternative up and running, privacy focused and – hopefully – self-hostable.

One of the project we followed since we decided to abandon Discord is Fluxer which looks like a great alternative, Open Source and Privacy Focused.

Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP platform built for friends, groups, and communities.

The little team (two to three souls, if I'm not mistaken) behind it made it very clear in their 2026 Roadmap that they're putting self-hosting in the first place

Aside from that, there are some notes here and there in the documentation that let us think positively of Fluxer

Self-hosted deployments won't include any traces of Plutonium, and nothing is paywalled. You can still configure your own tiers and limits in the admin panel. [...] As soon as the refactor is ready (not much longer now!), I'll enable PRs and interact more actively and push updates to this repository more frequently. The remaining parts of the refactor are currently being worked on and being tested live in production that has over 125,000 users (and we're only two full-time employees for now). After that, all work will happen openly in public.

Now now, kiddo, don't get overexcited. We were excited too about Matrix at the start, before learning all the curve balls that happened during the time we self-hosted our own Synapse instance, thus experiencing the lack of moderation tools. We were excited too about Revolt (now Stoat), before learning that it has absolutely no way to moderate several communities residing in a single self-hosted instance.

What we’re excited about now is trying Fluxer when official self-hosting becomes available in the near future. Popping up a new server (Alex, wait!!) and seeing all of the new shinies we were promised and how they work…

Keep your fingers crossed with ours too and let's follow closely the Fluxer development :)

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.