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Self-hosting is technically already possible, because the source code is public and free and open source software. However, handling the growth of users, currently at over 160K, has demanded a lot of attention on the production instance from a very small team (up until recently consisting of only one person — now we’re three!).I don’t recommend self-hosting just yet because the way data is persisted will change in the forthcoming public release (whereupon all development will happen fully in the public.)Fluxer is all about self-hosting and soon also federation. I recommend reading the launch blog post as well as the roadmap for 2026 if you think self-hosting is not a priority. It is! Moreover, the code in the public repository does not currently match what’s running in production. We’ve been maintaining a private copy temporarily to be able to focus on rapidly making changes and refactors to handle the scale of 160K users and don’t want people to rely on things that are changing constantly.We want the final stage of the refactor to be well-tested and ready to deploy without issues, and that’s why we’re testing it privately currently.Currently, the final revision of the refactor — which will make the codebase much easier to develop on and scale much better (both in terms of lower resource usage for smaller instances, and improved horizontal scalability with a better deployment story and fewer bottlenecks and allocations for large production instances like the official one Fluxer provides) — is being tested privately amongst the 1,000 people who became early Visionaries for $299 each on Fluxer.Many of these early supporters are technically adept and want to help us test and ensure that the new local development environment and architecture work well, and that we have everything needed to run a Fluxer instance at any scale — including the scale that Fluxer.app is on, because the code is free and open source software.You know how it is about ETAs, but in light of recent events, self-hosting is of course our #1 priority. We’re in an especially good position now that we’ve mostly finished with improvements to the infrastructure (we used to run everything on a single server that maxed out its CPU cores constantly), architecture (many changes to handle the scale we’re at better, based on actual profiling and identifying bottlenecks in production), and trust & safety (handling CSAM reporting, and figuring out ways to combat spam and abuse).If you approve of what we’re doing and want to help out, you can do so by following us on Bluesky or our RSS feed for the upcoming blog post on this. We also accept donations, and we’ll soon offer a $199 Operator Pass (one-time) for access to an exclusive Fluxer Operators community on the hosted Fluxer.app instance, where you can get priority access to the team and a fellow community of other early supporters of the self-hosting aspect of it all (all existing 1,000 Visionaries also implicitly have an Operator Pass already).Note that we’re not at all restricting access to any features of the software, requiring licence keys of any kind, or only providing paid support — but having the option to get paid support makes things more financially viable and means you can support Fluxer’s development and get a service in exchange. We’ll also help out with things to the best of our ability, plus the community can help you out too, on our GitHub Discussions. And donations (especially recurring ones!) are an even better way to support Fluxer long-term if you just want to support its development.
The message that follows this is already present in the README, but since this is where people were linked and since this caused some confusion, here it is again!
I’m repeating it again: Holy smokes, what a ride. Fluxer is taking off much earlier than I’d expected. I know it’s hard to resist, but please wait a little longer before you dive deep into the current codebase or try to set up self-hosting. I’m aware the current stack isn’t very lightweight. I’m working on making self-hosting as straightforward as possible and the development environment likewise. 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. Thanks for bearing with me. Development on Fluxer is about to get much easier, and the project will be made sustainable through community contributions and bounties for development work. Stay tuned – there’s not much left now. I thought I could take it a bit easier while shipping this stabilising update, but Discord’s announcement in February has changed things. There’s just been a lot of work involved in keeping the production deployment up and running, handling trust & safety concerns, answering support emails, handling billing issues, and working on the refactor at the same time. I’m really excited to open up development and make it easier for others to contribute, and I can’t wait to see what the community builds on Fluxer! 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 160,000 users (and we’re only two full-time engineers for now, plus a recently onboarded head of safety). After that, all work will happen openly in public. The team is also growing, though we remain small and can’t offer very competitive salaries just yet – but if you want to work part-time or contract on projects, or you think you’re a great fit for the roles we’re hiring for (though not as actively across all roles at this time, but we’ll keep you on file for when we are), check out the careers page :D ❤️