--- title: How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app | daily.dev description: A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative. The platform uses Erlang/OTP for real-time... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app | daily.dev og:description: A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative. The platform uses Erlang/OTP for real-time... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/IdIC9IiTz.png og:image:alt: How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 35 min read · 45 upvotes · 4 comments ## Summary A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative. The platform uses Erlang/OTP for real-time messaging (inspired by Discord's architecture), Cassandra for write-heavy workloads, and TypeScript for the backend. Self-hosters can use SQLite instead. The project is AGPLv3-licensed with a freemium hosted instance, accepts donations, and offers paid support. Federation is in development. The author discusses technical decisions, LLM usage for mechanical tasks, challenges with native apps vs Electron, and the goal of staying bootstrapped without VC funding. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@phanhotboy** · 1 upvotes >  **@r4shsec** · 0 upvotes > This is nice dude! **@t3k** · 0 upvotes > Absolute Legend **@pvrz** · 0 upvotes > This is amazing! Can’t wait to see where this goes. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Beyond Discord: Architecting a Sovereign Community with Matrix](https://daily.dev/posts/beyond-discord-architecting-a-sovereign-community-with-matrix-15smg3v5w) · SitePoint · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#discord](https://daily.dev/tags/discord), [#erlang](https://daily.dev/tags/erlang), [#apache-cassandra](https://daily.dev/tags/apache-cassandra) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"How I built Fluxer, a Discord-like chat app","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz"},"datePublished":"2026-02-11T17:46:48.631Z","dateModified":"2026-02-11T17:47:13.693Z","description":"A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative. 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