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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 4.5.10

Happy tooting!

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Updates

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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 8.2.0

Happy content creation!

#Peertube #Fediverse #Updates

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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 8.1.8

Fortunately our server wasn't impacted by any SQL Injection attempt and no malicious plugin was installed.

Happy content creation!

#Peertube #Fediverse #Updates

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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 4.5.10

Happy tooting!

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Updates

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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 8.1.6

Happy content creation!

#Peertube #Fediverse #Updates

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.

Costs

One time

Total: 0,00 € Notes: -

Monthly

Total: 79,90€ Notes: -

• OVH Cloud: Writefreely, Owncast and Peertube, IRC, The Lounge, Satisfactory Dedicated Server, Project Zomboid Dedicated Server
• Hetzner: Pixelfed Glitch, Mastodon Glitch, Status page, Object Storage, Discourse, ElasticSearch

Applied exchange rate 1 USD ≈ 0,95 EUR

Annual

Total: 39,02€ Notes: Domain registration will be paid in August '26

Donations

One time

Total: 11,00 € Notes: -

Recurring

Total: 67,00 € Notes: -

Balance

#2026 #April #MonthlyReport

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.

Costs

One time

Total: 0,00 € Notes: -

Monthly

Total: 79,90€ Notes: Due to a change in Hetzner's price list, the whole price will be indicated as cumulative. For ease of reading OVH will be indicated as cumulative too.

• OVH Cloud: Writefreely, Owncast and Peertube, IRC, The Lounge, Satisfactory Dedicated Server, Project Zomboid Dedicated Server
• Hetzner: Pixelfed Glitch, Mastodon Glitch, Status page, Object Storage, Discourse, ElasticSearch

Applied exchange rate 1 USD ≈ 0,95 EUR

Annual

Total: 39,02€ Notes: Domain registration will be paid in August '26

Donations

One time

Total: 40,00 € Notes: -

Recurring

Total: 66,00 € Notes: -

Balance

#2026 #March #MonthlyReport

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.

Check out the latest changelogs for version 8.1.5

Happy content creation!

#Peertube #Fediverse #Updates

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.

What emerged is that it''s increasingly clear that a lot of the Discord alternatives whilst very promising are just not quite ready yet and need more time to bake in various different ways. Put simply, all of them have trade offs and drawbacks unique to each. Discourse was a big hit with the community and it was with the staff too.

So we decided to shift our focus to Discourse, but why?

Why Discourse

It has to be said that whilst Discourse isn't and wasn't intended to be a Discord replacement, it worked for us in a way we perhaps totally missed – the fact that The Tavern is spread across the world and we don't all get to keep up with the flow of a live chat simply due to timezone restrictions.

Text and voice chat

That said, there is still a need or want to be able to have live chat in some instances. The plugin for this with Discourse was ok (not great, just ok) and filled a gap but was a little bit of a bolt on. There are however other options we can work on for this though, such as getting other services integrated with Discourse (i.e. XMPP, IRC or Mumble) to let us have more functionalities in the live chatting side of things, that will probably supersede the usage of Discourse chat plugin, making it useless and to be deactivated.

Is Discourse private (as in available to fews)?

No, it is not. As mentioned previously we self-host all our services in a secure production-ready manner and Discourse was no exception, so it's completely usable. In fact, everyone is welcome, may you be a lurker or the most active poster/chatter.

You can sign up directly at our Discourse instance or request a TGT SSO account if you are interested in our other services (like Writefreely, Peertube, etc.). Should you choose to go for the TGT SSO account please contact a Staff member because it requires a manual action from our side.

Is Discourse private (as in managed by us?)

Yes, it is. Our Discourse instance resides in a VPN in EU, as well as the Object Storage connected. Everything is hosted by Hetzner and by any means under the GDPR regulation. The only piece of infrastructure we're not managing directly is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is hosted by Bunny.net (find more about their stance about GDPR here). The contract the Staff agreed upon about data protection and data processing is available here.

What we will do next

Even though the community voted to continue on Discourse, we will still keep an eye on testing and checking out Discord alternatives as they develop more and get better and better with time (hopefully) and share with you if anything groundbreaking comes up or develops.

#Discord #Discourse

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.