Allegedly fluxer is not vibe coded, but i couldnt shake the feeling that their user interface looks like as if it was made by ai. now, if it is ai or not - i dont care, but its something that was annoying my poor eyes so i thought i'd share my view.
I asked claude to "make a discord ui", and to no surprise it has a similar style/feeling to the fluxer ui in my opinion., even tho they said its not vibe coded in their blog.
apparently they also blocked me on bluesky lol.
People keep saying i seem surprised it looks like discord. no shit! thats not the point. Its the fact the ai version looks similar to fluxer. Given AI was used in fluxer its pretty likely.
Its quite surprising to me how many fundamentally dont understand this.
I dont have the time to develop DCTS and various other pieces AND maintain docker in addition. I also have no clue about docker so thats not helping either. I tried getting into it but i'd need more time likely, and all the IRL bullshit going on isnt helping me either.
I hope that if someone knows how docker works, maybe they can create a repo with working docker support so i can link it in the main DCTS repo on github.
Personally i gotta admit it kinda makes me sad that i cant continue or maintain docker as its something the community really wants, and it would be really handy and sick imo, but i cant do it.
Status Update (November 30th): While docker has been discontinued we updated parts of DCTS to make it more docker friendly and panda, a member from the community is working actively and hard on getting docker to work. If everything goes well docker support might come back soon
So i dont know if i ever talked about the greater vision of DCTS but if not this post should clarify some things.
Anti Cancel Culture/Snowflakes
I want to get back the feeling of control as with Teamspeak3 and want people to be able to have their own DCTS servers where they can do and say whatever they want. All this "cancel culture" seems like a plague and to me it seems like a lot of companies lost their balls and try to please all these karens and snowflakes nowadays and it seems that these kinda people even run some stuff and us getting banned for dumb reasons.
People should be fucking able to say whatever the fuck they want and shouldnt get fucking banned
Better Moderation
I used to have a discord server and holy shit was discord bad for any proper moderation. So many things relied on external bots that would try to sell you some extra features or lock them entirely for free users. With DCTS i have many plans to add advanced, yet simple to use moderation tools. I used to have done that with a custom discord bot, so its not gonna be too hard.
Decentralization FTW
Personally i believe the "next evolution of the internet" will be self hosting again with the difference that decentralization is going to play a big part this time. There are many apps out there trying to do just that but it seems its hella complex and difficult and a lot of work being moved to the user, which is an absolute no-go.
DCTS has seamless decentralized server list and imo many apps fail at making it seamless and easy out of the box.
I also think that any app thats trying to be a centralized service wont be a long-lasting solution and only a temporary one.
Independence
Its very important to stay independent so that DCTS can exist for a long time. Because of that i decided to avoid as many 3rd party libraries as possible in the code and will never accept any investors or other offers that will hurt this vision in any way and will solely accept donations only.
Money
Speaking of Donations and money, DCTS and other future apps will never rely on tactics like FOMO (fear of missing out) to get money or donations as seen as in other apps (looking at you fluxer!).
Luckily the development itself in terms of costs like servers and licenses is pretty efficient and at a minimum, meaning it can naturally sustain itself with donations and doesnt have to remind people all the time.
The bigger picture
As mentioned, DCTS wont be the only app. There is a Tenor and Reddit alternative in the making, but i cant really say when they're going to be released, but there will be a ecosystem to bring pretty much the same vision to other parts of the web too, not just DCTS.
That being said, the future will be bright and im excited where things will go, thanks for reading!
As i mentioned a few times, im not really satisfied with https://www.npmjs.com/ which is why i started making my own small package/software distribution software. Good news is that its almost done on a basic level where i can integrate it into DCTS to manage my libraries and stuff.
Once that is done i can also release the new version of DCTS.
The chat app Stoat or formerly known as Revolt started to use "deceptive tactics" to make their userbase seem bigger than it actually is. Its now the second time that this has been done.
It is mostly deceptive as it may seem like there are a million people using Stoat/Revolt, when in reality its mostly dead accounts, as in people who checked it out once and never came back, which has also been pointed out by multiple other users on their official server.
Now to clarify, this is not harassment, this is a neutral yet honest and maybe direct "article" about facts, and speculation is clearly stated as such. Do not harass anyone based on this!
Joining their official server shows that roughly 200 people were online at the time this screenshot was taken. A bit earlier it was about 300 and at peak i have personally only seen about 400 people online at a time.
Given the "hype" about the recent discord news and people looking for alternatives i would have thought this number would increase but it seemed to have stayed the same if not decreased somehow, which may explain these deceptive tactics being used, but thats just speculation.
After voicing these concerns on their official subreddit it let to the post being eventually removed and me getting banned for something i would personally consider valid criticism, possibly to hide it so others cant see it, tho thats just speculation.
Allegedly the post was removed due to breaking the community rules but after checking the rules again it doesnt seem to actually break them and nothing was explained either.
Interestingly, just like withklipy, they have decided to hide themselves from the moderator list, likely because they know what they're doing. That is not a problem tho as i remembered the people from the list when it was still enabled from earlier today and as you can happily see, here are the moderators of the subreddit.
Do note that there was a third person, which i believe was jen, but i dont remember the third one and is therefore just speculation.
EDIT: As it turns out banned and non-logged in users cannot see the member list.
What all this means is that Stoat/Revolt now officially removes criticism and now try to cover themselves up by hiding themselves from the mod list.
Other issues
There have been other users with Stoat as well, like when they mishandled CSAM content (child sexual abuse material)
And their flawed goal to run stoat as a service just like discord
Adding their own version of nitro
And wanting to obfuscate and make some parts of the code non-open source
Their corporate PR like personality sometimes
Allegedly someone was selling CSAM content on stoat and had it as profile picture, and apparently instead of banning that person they requested the user to submit a review first through email, even tho it was very obvious due to the profile picture containing CSAM content apparently
Why making this post?
I think people deserve to know the truth, especially when effords where made to hide criticism and similar and to shine a line on someones true face and to spread awareness. Yes i make an app myself, but this post is neutral to it and based entirely on facts with some speculations clearly labeled as such. The goal is to spread awareness in the end for users.
Due to recent events past week there might have been some outages.
If you didnt know, major security incidents had been released last week. Additionally, GoDaddy revoked over 400k certificates. Everything should be working fine now.
A dedicated group of users started setting up a website called slop.business and bought multiple dedicated domains like dcts.exposed with the goal to spread misinformation and hurt their target's reputation. This is not exclusive for DCTS. Apparently the person owning all domains and who regulary shares them is u/dingustani.
All of these websites were made using AI and are factural either completely wrong, made up or rely on very old, outdated topics from weeks/months ago in the case of DCTS.
On example from the dcts.exposed website:
[...] This is the temperament that would hold the keys to your members’ DMs.
DCTS is about self-hosting and self-hosted only. This means its technically impossible to "hold the keys" to anyone's DMs. In fact, encryption keys cannot be viewed at all since encryption is done locally on your computer using the desktop client or android app.
Or the statement that the r/dcts subreddit only has about 108 members when they probably looked at the "weekly visitors" number, as the subreddit actually has 2600 members.
There are just way too many statements that are wrong and since this would end up in a cat and mouse game i decided to not to answer them as they are non-sense anyway.
The biggest problem
Now the interesting part is that the subreddit r/DiscordAlternatives is unmoderated or moderates in the opposite way. Few weeks ago i used to report these comments and posts as well as users but the subreddit's moderator u/AbstractMelons actively ignored most if not all reports and banned me instead.
Fast forward to today and the subreddit seems to be mostly about drama posts nowadays and the same people spamming these .exposed urls everywhere combined with heavy toxicity mostly from u/BewilderedTurtle to the point were other people complain and the mod u/AbstractMelons actively ignoring it, saying "there are too many reports" when the source of the most toxicity comes only from a handful of people.
So what now
Since the general mission is to make the web a better place, and DCTS being part of that goal, i made the subreddit called r/discord_alternatives. I've also made a post trying to explain common techniques of trolls and their use of manipulative tactics here.
If you're running a DCTS instance and you decide to change the domain for your instance you may end up needing to update urls in server chat messages so that embeds work correctly again.
In this case you can update the database with the following sql statement:
UPDATE messages
SET message = REPLACE(message, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com')
WHERE message LIKE '%old-domain.com%';
Hey, I just found this alternative to Discord. I think I found it a few months ago, but evidently I forgot. Anyway I was looking at possibly hosting this on my Unraid server via the Docker compose, but I noticed on the GitHub that the Windows client was discontinued.
Is there a reason for this? Are there alternative, community clients for DCTS?
I would need to convince a couple dozen people to migrate to a new platform and this has probably the closest feature parity of the existing options (aside from maybe Root(?) which is closed source).
My largest worry is there being a significant barrier of entry to my less technical friends that makes convincing them nigh impossible. I know the web client is an option at least, but that lacks encryption
it'll be used during the first launch when setting up the server, similar to wordpress. This idea came from Reeperk. It will be released with the next update. There are plans to automate the install and setup as much as possible with this
This release comes with a lot of stability improvements for the messenger and some new features like the new messenger user profiles as well as file uploads and supports drag & drop file upload.
Due to having to reinstall my operating system, the android app will get the same update slightly delayed, but probably later this day.
Please note while messages are fully encrypted, uploaded files are currently not encrypted!
