Fluxer is free and open source under the GNU Affero General Public Licence, version 3.0 or later. The server, web app and desktop app are in fluxerapp/fluxer, and the iOS and Android apps have been open source in fluxerapp/flutter_client since 15 June 2026.
Is Fluxer really open source?
Yes. Anyone can run, study, change and share the code under the terms of the AGPL, including to run their own Fluxer instance. Self-hosting is free, with no licence key, paid tier or reduced edition, and you never need our permission to run it.
On your own instance, Fluxer has none of its messages, files or accounts. The official apps connect to self-hosted instances, and everything on our roadmap, including federation and end-to-end encryption, goes into the same open source code.
Does Fluxer require a CLA?
No. Contributors keep the copyright in their work and add a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off to each commit. Fluxer had a contributor licence agreement for about six weeks in early 2026, and it has since been removed, so no contributor signs one today.
Could Fluxer go closed source?
Every published version of Fluxer stays open source under the AGPL, and anyone can keep running and forking it. Section 2 of the licence makes its permissions irrevocable as long as you meet its conditions, and nobody can take back the rights you already have to it. Everything on our roadmap goes into the same open source code.
Fluxer has had no CLA since 18 February 2026, so Fluxer Platform AB can't relicense contributors' work under any other licence without their permission, apart from work sent before that day by contributors who signed the old CLA.
What happened to Fluxer's code in spring 2026?
In spring 2026, Hampus worked on many ideas to make Fluxer easier to self-host, including running all of it as a single binary, and he shared early builds with Visionaries and a few other people as a test group. At the same time, waves of spam and attempts to share child sexual abuse material hit fluxer.com, and he added safety checks to stop them.
Those checks were built right into the code in many places, and publishing them would have shown spammers how to get around them, so making the work public kept getting pushed back. The single binary didn't work out, but a lot of good things came out of that experiment, and they went into the public codebase on GitHub on 15 June 2026.
Holding the code back was an emergency measure during those attacks, not a step away from open source. The work is published on GitHub under the AGPL like the rest of Fluxer. Hampus held it back for a short time for his own wellbeing, while a lot was being asked of him from every direction, and he doesn't plan to do it again.
How do I contribute or report a bug?
Code contributions are pull requests on GitHub until we move to Forgejo, and the contributing guidelines list everything a pull request needs, including what you can and can't use an LLM for. Bug reports and feature requests go to Fluxer Feedback, where you sign in with your Fluxer account, and GitHub Issues and Discussions are both closed. Please report any security issue to us privately under our security policy.