Product autopsy · Fermi / Harmony / Jank Client
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.
What this site 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.
Their specials, translated
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.
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.
The legal excuse for the AI ban is GPLv3 compatibility. LICENSE is
AGPL-3.0. package.json says GPL-3.0. Translatewiki lists
AGPL v3. The README cannot spell compatible.
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.”
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. Version: 0.0.1.
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 A
That is the Open Graph description on fermi.chat. The screenshot they chose to sell it 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
Enrico Fermi asked where the aliens were. This project answered by renaming Jank Client and posting the changelog to Reddit.
The 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.
Start here
Every major sentence on fermi.chat and the README, set next to the files.
The anti-AI rule, the GPL excuse, and the hardware they still plug in.
The ban, the fork, the weekly posts, the sole-discretion CoC.
Their Discord-alternatives roundup, rewritten without the sermon.
Links to the live pages, repos, blog posts, and Reddit threads used here.
fermi.exposed