Fermi: Exposed

Fermi sells a Discord alternative for people who hate machines. The live homepage on fermi.chat still greets you with the i18n key welcomeJank, asks you to “requestion features,” and sends the community to a discord.com guild. The anti-AI rule is the whole personality. The software is a Discord skin that forked its backend after a moderation fight.

Anti-AI doctrine Claims

any	3	1
Use of AI banned in Fermi, including assistance, “for legal reasons.”	Licenses, depending which file you open: AGPL, ~~GPL-3.0~~ AGPL-3.0 (deprecated SPDX), or “GPLv3.”	Displayed Harmony instance. Spacebar is still in the JSON, hidden.

What this is

Fermi is a TypeScript / HTML / CSS web client for Harmony, a Discord-API clone. It shipped for years as Jank Client. Mathium05 (GitHub MathMan05, Reddit u/MathManrm) still has JANK_INSTANCES_PATH in production, Discord badge code in Dbadges.ts, and a homepage that logs console.warn(json) while it fetches instances.

Harmony is a Spacebar fork. Spacebar is a Fosscord continuation. Fosscord was “what if we reverse-engineered discord.com.” In March 2026 the maintainer got banned from the Spacebar Discord for arguing against AI, waited two weeks, then forked the backend and named it after a community vote Spacebar had already lost.

Then the weekly posts started. r/selfhosted, r/fermichat, Twitter / Facebook / Bluesky share buttons on every changelog. The pitch is FLOSS purity. The product still needs Discord to have a room.

Notes

Anti-AI

README: “any use of AI is not allowed in Fermi.” Harmony contributing: no AI-generated, AI-assisted, or machine-generated patches, “for legal reasons.” Fluxer is dismissed in one line because “It uses AI.” The same people type this on GitHub, Node, SWC, and a Discord tab.

Independent

Harmony’s own docs send support questions to “our discord.com guild.” Fermi’s header still links a Harmony guild invite. The official screenshot on the homepage is a Discord layout down to the member list, the blurple, and the GIF button.

FOSS

The legal excuse for the AI ban is GPLv3 compatibility. LICENSE is AGPL-3.0. package.json said ~~GPL-3.0~~ until September 24, 2026, then AGPL-3.0, a deprecated SPDX id. Translatewiki lists AGPL v3. The README cannot spell compatible.

Managed

The Spacebar essay is 4,000 words of “I was never treated particularly well,” then a two-week ultimatum, then Harmony. Code of conduct: one person, sole discretion, “please don’t create problems for me,” “this is a FOSS project, not a court of law.”

Finished

August 2025: bundling, logging out, and “Fermi should no longer crash when a very long message is created.” Friend requests still pending. Push notifications: no. Interactions: no. E2EE: a future blog goal.

Community

Weekly r/selfhosted threads that reintroduce what Spacebar is, every time, because nobody remembered from last week. A dedicated subreddit. Share-to-Facebook on a project that thinks recommendation algorithms are the devil.

Exhibit: the official screenshot

Open Graph on fermi.chat: “Join a community of people and start chatting!” The screenshot they chose is a Spacebar staging server where Mathium05 says “Spacebar is getting more active now!” and the other person says “ehh / nothing.”

the main instance lacks users, so people don't want to join due to the lack of users.

Mathium05, “The State of Fermi,” August 2025

Official Fermi homepage screenshot: Discord-like client on Spacebar Staging Official.

Official marketing screenshot from fermi.chat. Channel list, member list, GIF button, bot tags.

Founder

Mathium05 writes as “we” when Harmony needs a founding myth, and as “I’m just one person” when the code of conduct needs an escape hatch. They post weekly. They review other Discord alternatives in public, and Fluxer gets a single word: no, because AI.

If you would not hand a community to someone whose first institutional act after a Discord ban was to fork the server software, you already understand the product.

Founder Doctrine