u/ad3lyt

Disclaimer of conflict of interest: I am the owner of a direct competitor (Echo), and the only reviewer.

Hey guys, I am back with another review this time of the big boss Fluxer which will likely be used as the main point of comparison to other platforms as it will likely be one of the highest scoring which it did fairly so today but imperfectly.

Note: This review is based on the stable public release of Fluxer as of 2026/8/11, the canary is known to have higher feature parity and receive changes earlier, so take the review more holistically as the specific details are subject to change.

Trust Score 5/9:

Fluxer scored pretty big on some categories, and lost some points on others. I expect this to go up on the annual re-review.

On License Fluxer scored 3/3 as it is fully open source (Minus some operational cook book which is okay in my desecration)

On centralisation Fluxer scored a 0/3, Fluxer as of today remains fully centralised and while there are plans to become federated in the future, promises will not give you points here.

Though this is something to consider if you want to use Fluxer as a promise is better than nothing.

Note: Fluxer still get the 3 points for being FOSS, and you can get the source and run it on your own device with your own instance, and Fluxer's devs have put in effort to making sure it runs smoother on your device. However the centralisation metric has to do with the actual operating platform and how decentralised it is, not whether or not you can run an instance of it.

On other trust factors Fluxer scored a 2/3, it has an exceptionally user friendly T.O.S, has been in development for a number of years and has been out for longer than many alternatives, mostly clean reputation though with some major hickups such as the image scanning incident. I also expect this score to go up by the next time we review, unless any other major incidents happen.

Experience Score 6/9:

Fluxer is very useable and for the most part people won't complain, it is still growing and not quite at discord level polish and it lacks its own identity, but in terms of the core stuff and the basics, Fluxer as a technical product is mostly ready, just lacking in discord level polish.

On UI Fluxer scored a 2/3, in most areas Fluxer's UI will not leave you complaining, if functionality and familiarity is what you are looking for.

However if you care about a unique visual identity, Fluxer is a shameless discord clone.

If you care about attention to detail, you will be frequently disappointed by many small things that compound, so the major judgement is that Fluxer's UI is very functional though not unique and imperfectly polished.

Examples include but are not limited to: double background darkening, no inline composer preview of markdown or even emojis, no email design, awkwardness around light mode such in voice chat shadowing, imperfect skeleton shapes, lots of dead space that doesn't dynamically adjust and more.

On UX Fluxer scored a 2/3, once again good but imperfect. Fluxer is largely functional, though the user experience in some areas lacks polish and some of the stuff you would expect.

And Fluxer is not as generous as other alternatives in many aspects and even worse than even discord in some, such as deleting media, though if there was a sustainability score Fluxer would win points there.

Examples include: Preview widget only in edge corners, slow initial emoji load (though this is a technical tradeoff), jerky scroll corrections, views in modals (RBAC View for example) and more.

On Feature Parity and Completeness Fluxer scored a 2/3, if you are looking for the basics and core stuff, Fluxer has you covered, you will not be left asking for anything you need to move over from Discord.

However Fluxer has yet to achieve full feature parity, and considering that some alternative have reached beyond feature parity with discord, it would not be fair to give Fluxer a perfect score yet.

Where others have gone and implemented true full markdown support and even katex, or voice chat activities, fluxer still lacks behind in having no composer preview, no voice chat side chat and other things of that nature.

Readiness Score 5/9:

Fluxer while likely the most ready true discord alternative on the market, it is far from being fully ready to replace discord, and the Fluxer founders would likely agree too, if you asked me for a recommendation I would not feel bad recommending Fluxer at all, however if you asked me for a solid prediction I would not be as certain.

Popularity 2/3:

The thing that puts Fluxer in the big leagues is the fact that it boasts numbers of above 100k Users and has been one of the fastest growing alternatives, which makes it a much more viable replacement now for Discord. However this is still no where near discord which itself has those numbers many more times just in some of its biggest servers (which themselves are user limited otherwise they would likely be bigger)

So definitely one of the bigger and more viable alternatives, but no where near discord level, which itself is two issues, on one side you might not find enough people, especially the more specific you want to be, but also on a technical side, Fluxer has not proven itself to handle discord level scale, because it never had discord level scale, which will be an important issue in the future.

Platform Parity 2/3:

Fluxer is available to both PC and Mobile users, as a web and real downloadable client. It is not available on Console yet, which Discord is.

Other Readiness Factors 1/3:

The various Fluxer releases, especially on mobile, are far from mature, they are largely in beta still, so by Fluxer's own admission, this is far from its final form yet and so I can't give it any higher score than 1.

Disclosure (Conflict of Interest): Echo Founder, a Direct Competitor to Fenrid.

TLDR: Was released to the public too early, overhyped, way too much obvious LLM assistance without care for smaller details with some major red flags.

Score: 3/10
Source: Proprietary at the moment
Type: Centralised
Slop?: Heavy

Jurisdiction: Turkey, it is claimed that Fenrid is an LLC in New Mexico which in it self is okay but what is more concerning is that Turkish Jurisdiction does partially apply as per their own T.O.S 7.5, and the Founder as per communication in E-Mails also resides in Turkey.

Turkey is an authoritarian State, with a bad track record when it comes to respecting privacy, rights or anything of the like, any Turkish state involvement or jurisdiction over Fenrid is a major red flag.

Overall Experience and Take:

Fenrid aesthetically is the best looking clone of Discord, it does not have a unique look to it, but in terms of platforms that try to directly clone Discord, it has done so in the most tasteful way IMO.

However while there are plenty of super cool aesthetic ideas that look really nice in pictures when posted on the website, the consistency and attention to detail is an absolute 0, everywhere you look there are nonsensical and inconsistent decision made, that ruin the UI/UX experience for anyone who cares.

If smaller details matter to you, Fenrid is not a platform that gives a lot of love to it whatsoever.

The massive level of inconsistency, is very likely a sign of very great LLM assistance, as it can apply one standard in one place and another in another without care for the bigger picture, not thought of what smaller details mean together, this is where human effort and mocking over months makes the difference, something that Fenrid clearly did not do.

On the positive side, Fenrid's backend did shine at times with really nice blazing fast speed, such as with Emoji menu load times and caching times, that beats any other platform i have seen, including my own, and including discord's.

Though that itself comes with caveats, Fenrid is still a 0 user platform, with a stack as admitted by the Founder himself is not one that will easily scale, and whatever wins he made in the backend are often lost in the frontend due to bad decisions such as making everything be real to the server instead of using optimistic loading for example when creating new roles (Where there batching would have been a better decision and a more scaleable one) or sending messages or updating many stuff.

One of the most horrible places for server trueness is in voice calls, where instead of using the local truth as the immediate one for voice activity and its indicator, it will only light up once it hits the server, which will give you a horrible feeling of delay if you are coming from a platform like Discord where the feedback is immediate.

This comes back to the same repeating idea, Fenrid has built a lot, but yet in every small detail which requires real use and care, Fenrid fails to deliver.

Fenrid aesthetically is the best looking clone of Discord, it does not have a unique look to it, but in terms of platforms that try to directly clone Discord, it has done so in the most tasteful way IMO.

However while there are plenty of super cool aesthetic ideas that look really nice in pictures when posted on the website, the consistency and attention to detail is an absolute 0, everywhere you look there are nonsensical and inconsistent decision made, that ruin the UI/UX experience for anyone who cares.

If smaller details matter to you, Fenrid is not a platform that gives a lot of love to it whatsoever.

The massive level of inconsistency, is very likely a sign of very great LLM assistance, as it can apply one standard in one place and another in another without care for the bigger picture, not thought of what smaller details mean together, this is where human effort and mocking over months makes the difference, something that Fenrid clearly did not do.

On the positive side, Fenrid's backend did shine at times with really nice blazing fast speed, such as with Emoji menu load times and caching times, that beats any other platform i have seen, including my own, and including discord's.

And there are some random things where Fenrid has clearly paid more attention and made them nice, like really strong and nice Markdown support with UI to go with it, the most beautiful code blocks I have seen on any platform yet, a dedicated table maker UI. All of that is super cool if we ignore the fact that Composer (Chat Input) is not bigger than 2-3 lines and does not expand vertically, so writing anything where you would need real good markdown support is very unpleasant.

As for the niceness of the backend speeds, they also come with caveats, Fenrid is still a 0 user platform, with a stack as admitted by the Founder himself is not one that will easily scale, and whatever wins he made in the backend are often lost in the frontend due to bad decisions such as making everything be real to the server instead of using optimistic loading for example when creating new roles (Where there batching would have been a better decision and a more scaleable one) or sending messages or updating many stuff.

One of the most horrible places for server trueness is in voice calls, where instead of using the local truth as the immediate one for voice activity and its indicator, it will only light up once it hits the server, which will give you a horrible feeling of delay if you are coming from a platform like Discord where the feedback is immediate.

This comes back to the same repeating idea, Fenrid has built a lot, but yet in every small detail which requires real use and care, Fenrid fails to deliver.

Important Notes:

Fenrid is technically still in Alpha and some of this is to be expected, though it is painfully clear that this is an very strongly LLM assisted project without enough care given to it from the Founder to be a well rounded product.

You can quickly tell that without even using Fenrid, through what he advertises as "selling points" in his roadmap.

The founder's philosophy as spoken is inconsistent with his actions shown in the platform, choosing an easier stack to develop more easily and not have hurdles, yet giving more care to random features in the platform like full markdown support without realising that your composer doesn't scale, clear signs of someone who cares more about feature count and headlines than quality of the basics.

There are major rumours and allegations regarding Fenrid's security practices and care, as well as the Founder's own funding source and coding practices, which are concerning however I will not take them seriously until stronger proof comes in, and i hope everyone else also does not accept everything negative as true.

Final Statement and Review:

I will give Fenrid a 3/10, it has plenty of cool ideas that show in some places but their execution is inconsistent, Fenrid to this day remains Closed Source though the owner claimed this will change soon, the lack of attention to care particularly hurts the quality of the experience and drags down the score.

However I am hopeful that this will change, Fenrid is still in its very early stages and i believe the founder will keep going until its a much better platform, and I support lots of Fenrid's Ideas, however in its current form, I would not recommend Fenrid.

I would love to hear from anyone else who has tried out Fenrid, and hopefully you guys have had a better experience than me, I do not like writing negative reviews.

Recently a post has been made by the user u/exogreek, claiming that Echo is incredibly insecure and that no one should trust it.

OP made several security claims, some of which don't qualify as security issues to begin with, such as being able to modify your own client, but all of which he refuses to provide proof for, as he himself wants Echo to stay "broken" and does not want it to get fixed.

Which goes against the ethics of any legitimate Cyber security expert, real cyber security experts report issues via GitHub, not on reddit, and when they do, they provide evidence for the holes which they have found, which he refuses to do.

Echo is extremely strict when it comes DOMPurification, and has many many guards in place against exactly the type of security issues that u/exogreek is claiming are present, I personally tested against all of them, and can confirm that while you can post scripts as text and even name yourself as such, this does not pass through to the backend and does not execute on any secondary client.

It is true that you can do things like change the light mode via scripts, but being able to change your client is perfectly normal and not a vulnerability, think of BetterDiscord, this is perfectly expected, which is something that u/exogreek does not understand.

As for CSRF bypasses and direct writes to DB claims, there is no evidence whatsoever to prove that they are true, which Echo has logging in place for, they could not be replicated and are simply a blatant lie.

The motivation of u/exogreek is very simple, he is a bully and he enjoys harassing me, and shitting on me, my reputation and the product which I created.

He has shown 0 interest to discuss in any technical matters, instead resorting to insulting the intelligence of any skeptic of his claims, or real SWE, including my self.

However, I do have to clarify, that there was one security incident, which did not involve any user data, Echo in its very early days was at first started in dev mode, which did allow people who knew what to look for to read its source (Echo is AGPLV3 fully open source btw) including API keys.

The server was immediately shutdown and all keys were rotated, and the issue was resolved within the same hour, all user data on server was separately containerised so it was not at risk.

This however was not reported by u/exogreek, all reports made by u/exogreek are demonstrably false, and his intention is simply to bully and harass.

here are some responses from other people who have looked into it

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1ts9ccz/comment/ootwog0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1ts9ccz/comment/ooylr8g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/comments/1ts9ccz/comment/op0g2rn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

A post was made accusing Echo of serious security issues, botting, and other misconduct. Since those claims are public and serious, I want to respond clearly.

First: I take security seriously. Echo is open source, and the code is publicly available for anyone to review. If there is a real vulnerability in Echo, I want it reported responsibly so it can be fixed. I am not asking anyone to hide issues. I am asking for reproducible evidence: affected route, request example, code reference, screenshot, video, or a private report.

So far, the person making these claims has not provided any reproducible proof.

They have claimed things like stored XSS, CSRF bypasses, direct database manipulation, and data exposure, but have refused to provide a minimal proof-of-concept, affected endpoints, code references, or a private responsible disclosure. When asked by other users for evidence, they repeatedly avoided providing it and instead shifted into personal insults.

This is not new behavior. This person has been hostile toward me and Echo for months, including personal attacks, insults, and repeated attempts to discredit the project without giving actionable reports. Instead of reporting issues they were more concerned in finding my Youtube channel from years ago and making fun of me for it. They have made it clear they are not interested in responsible disclosure or helping fix anything; they are interested in publicly shitting on me and the project.

To be clear:

• I have done no upvote botting, downvote botting and none of the few people that stood by my side are bots and this is easily verifiable
• I am not aware of any currently exploitable vulnerability matching the claims in that post.
• Echo has had security improvements over time, and I will continue improving it.
• If someone finds a real issue, I will prioritize it.
• Personal attacks about my age, job, coding style, or old Reddit history are not security evidence.

If anyone can reproduce a real vulnerability, please report it responsibly through GitHub or contact me directly. I will review valid reports, patch confirmed issues, and credit the reporter if they want credit.

What I will not do is accept vague public accusations as fact when no proof is provided and the person making them refuses to provide anything users can verify.

Echo is young, open source, and still improving. Criticism is fair. Security reports are welcome. But public smear posts without evidence are not responsible disclosure, and they do not help users make informed decisions.

Hey guys, I am the founder of Echo, a fully open source discord alternative with full feature parity to discord, I've been working on this for a long time now and open sourced it recently

Some of you guys have tried it out, and would love to hear some of the feedback!

Try it out at chat-echo.cm or audit it at https://github.com/ad3lre/echo

Echo is a fully open source (AGPLv3) Web App designed to be a viable alternative to discord with full feature parity

It supports

- Streaming, Voice/Video Calling, Texting
- Full fledged communities with auto mod, permission system, emoji system etc..

Basically everything discord had and more, but with better privacy promises and no ID checks, no getting randomly banned, just what discord should've been.

Feel free to try it out at chat-echo.com or audit it at https://github.com/ad3lre/echo/

Source on Github: https://github.com/ad3lre/echo
Direct link: https://chat-echo.com

Ask me any thing about it you would like!

Audit it at: https://github.com/ad3lre/echo or try it out at https://chat-echo.com

Try it out at https://chat-echo.com

Try it out at https://chat-echo.com

Hey guys I am looking for testers and feedback on my new chatting app Echo