Flux is a fully distributed, human-centered platform that facilitates social coordination with greater privacy, agency, and flexibility. With a Discord style design for communities to grow on, Flux is customizable open-source software made for Web3 integrations.

Flux at a Glance

Description: Flux is a fully distributed, Discord style platform.

Why is Flux being built?

When using traditional social media applications you are always restricted by the feature sets that the developers of that specific app have decided to implement. Discord, Facebook, Slack, and others are all implementing features like events, chat, groups, posts etc. The vision for Flux is to become a general purpose platform for collaboration. Community members themselves decide which features they want to install using our plugin store. And any developer can extend their community’s plugins by developing their own.

Why did they choose Holochain?

Flux is built on AD4M, which is an agent-centric framework for decentralized social applications. The core of AD4M uses Holochain, which makes Flux extendable and customizable while ensuring validation rules are enforced.

Flux, as a project, grew out of Junto which had set out to build a social media platform using Holochain where people held their own data. As it developed Junto shifted focus to more intimate communities, becoming Flux. The importance of agent-centricity and data ownership remains however. So while there are many p2p technologies out there, Holochain continues to be a key tool for delivering on this vision.

Flux Ecosystem Session

Get a hands on view of Flux as David Atkinson downloads and uses the app with the Flux team in an ecosystem session.

Can you say more about the collaborative potential of Flux?

While the collaborative nature of Flux seems apparent in its basic Discord-like features, its true power lies beneath the surface. First, as an AD4M app, Flux is completely interoperable with any other AD4M app — meaning you can see data from Flux in any other UI built over AD4M. This means you could turn chat messages into “to-do” stickies in a different view, without actually duplicating or siloing any data. Because AD4M decouples data from the front-end, it’s super simple to develop new apps or UIs, deploy them, and invite others to use them with you. In this way, Flux is a fully evolvable and extendable platform in which any user can develop new features and put them into play with others.

How are they using Holochain?

AD4M is a sort of spanning layer that connects lots of different protocols together, from Ethereum to AWS. AD4M uses Holochain to store these connections and ensure their security. While it is designed to connect all of these different protocols together, AD4M needs Holochain to bootstrap everything and make it open, resilient, and scalable.

In many ways AD4M is an extension upon Holochain, taking the same root ideas of agent-centricity, and giving them access to all of these other systems to interact with. Holochain is the key enabler of this social technology.

Can you say a little about your experience developing on Holochain?

The way that Flux accesses Holochain through the AD4M spanning layer makes it even easier to build applications on Holochain as the SDK really feels like working with a traditional real time database like Firebase! This is a different way of interacting with Holochain than most developer teams have, but we really think that this is just the beginning of all the ways this technology will be used. We are learning and building alongside Holochain with excitement for the future.

How can I get involved?

Join the AD4M Discord, where you can connect with us about Flux and other AD4M apps: discord.com/invite/mP4vQkVgwp

Try Flux yourself! First download ad4m (ad4m.dev/download), and then connect to Flux (app.fluxsocial.io/) and join our test community.