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.