fermi.exposed
On Spacebar
“Spacebar has poor management issues, and has undergone many poor changes. I can no longer recommend its usage.” This is after years of posting Fermi as the Spacebar client, and after forking the backend.
Founder exhibit · Mathium05
Do not hand this person a schism.
Fermi asks you to self-host a Discord clone and trust a single maintainer whose public record is weekly promo threads, a purity oath about AI, and a backend fork that started as a Discord ban. The Harmony “we” is fan fiction. The CoC is the manual.
Public names attached to the same project: GitHub MathMan05, Codeberg Mathium05, Reddit u/MathManrm, Liberapay Mathium05, translatewiki User:MathMan05. They/them, by their own translatewiki page. Student cadence: blog posts mention classes, school starting, “irl issues.”
The client was Jank Client until 2025. Translatewiki had to rename the project. The
env var is still JANK_INSTANCES_PATH. The welcome string is still
welcomeJank. GitHub topics still include jankclient.
The move
Banned on Discord. Forked the server.
Mathium05’s own Spacebar essay, published as a Discord-alternatives explainer:
On March 29, 2026 I was banned from the Spacebar Discord for arguing against AI use in projects. They now claim it was for other reasons, but this was the actual incident. “Spacebar, a Story of Mismanagement”
Two weeks, then Harmony. People who told them to wait longer get a paragraph. People who forked Fermi to allow AI get an addendum: the fork went closed source, “further disappointing and expected.” The naming story is that Harmony won a Spacebar vote years ago and Spacebar picked Spacebar anyway, so the fork takes the rejected name as a loyalty badge.
That is a lot of institutional memory for a project whose contributing guide is one paragraph of “this ain’t exactly rocket science.”
How they treat a community
Sole discretion, not a court of law.
“It's nothing complicated, I want to foster a nice community, if there's any issues feel free to contact me in any way you see fit, though please don't create problems for me. I'm just one person and I want to work on this project, not community management. I will likely start with a warning or two if any issues arise, though this is up to my (mathium05) sole discretion.”
“Do not try to pull technicalities, this is a FOSS project, not a court of law.”
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, Fermi
Harmony’s launch post says “we.” The CoC says one person. Both can be true in the sense that volunteers exist. Only one of them holds the ban hammer, the AI doctrine, and the blog.
The loudspeaker
This week in Fermi, this week in Fermi, this week in Fermi.
u/MathManrm’s r/selfhosted cadence is a template. Reintroduce Fermi. Reintroduce Spacebar (later Harmony). Link the blog. Add “for those who don’t know.” One November 2025 thread scored about 10 upvotes and still spelled the project “Fermu” in the body. December: “I’ve also created a subreddit.” The blog injects Twitter, Facebook, and Bluesky share links on every changelog.
That is not a crime. It is a marketing department of one, pointed at every self-hosted comment section that will still load. The same person then grades Fluxer out of the category because it uses AI. Fermi’s method is volume plus a purity oath.
Public voice
The register in the posts.
On Fluxer
“No. Just no. It uses AI.” A competing Discord alternative, dismissed in a sentence that is also the project’s theology.
On themselves
“I've been making Fermi for nearly 2 years now, and I'm starting to run out of things to actually implement into Fermi that don't require the server to start supporting it.” Then they took the server.
The August 2025 state-of post is the most honest document in the tree: no icon that fits the new name, Firefox voice chat unfinished, mobile fixes pending, “keyboard shortcuts: basically everything,” and the chicken-and-egg empty instance. School starting back up. That person is allowed to ship unfinished software. They are not owed a captive community, a sermon about other people’s tools, or the assumption that a Discord ban is a founding document.