Direct link to the funding campaign to help accelerate the development of Discord-like features, such as servers with rooms/spaces, as well as drop-in voice channels.
It’s quite an impressive little app capable of:
- Excellent text chats with file upload support, including solid optional encryption (OMEMO, based on Signal’s encryption but modified to be compatible with federation)
- Group voice/video calls with screensharing (just implemented, must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app’s audio at the moment)
- A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
- a fun built-in paint program to easily annotate documents or draw stuff into the chat
- Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end, which allows it to scale up reliably and easily self-host (XMPP is very lightweight).
- Uses the AGPL license, ensuring that corpos won’t be able to take it over. It’ll be community-owned forever.
In message-mode, it looks fairly similar to Discord:
The dev also posted a preview of what the new spaces feature looks like in the development branch:
Unlike Signal, Movim doesn’t require a phone number email to create an account. And since it runs right in the browser, it’s extremely quick to sign up and give it a test to see if it can meet your needs.
And if a Discord-alternative built on a truly open and federated protocol is something you want, consider throwing the dev a donation, or contributing with code (if you have the skills and time) or helping improve the documentation! :D
To stay updated on its progress, the !xmpp@slrpnk.net community pretty reliably posts news about it.
I have never understood why the love for Discord. It’s just a chat service.
I miss 90’s era Trillian.
It combines a lot of features that otherwise require multiple other apps to achieve the same result, and thus requires you and your friends to create multiple accounts. Not insurmountable in theory, but people are primed for convenience, so it’s good to have a truly federated FLOSS replacement for that, just as Lemmy/Piefed are federated FLOSS replacements for reddit.
I guess the main points are voice chat channels, community building, bots, free, chat capability as well.
It was pretty attractive for gamers. Especially in the MMO section where you needed to get 20+ people in. Compared to in-game voice it was private as well, so you weren’t talking for your entire lobby.
It’s not just a text chat app/IRC replacement. There’s no calling, just voice channels. Hop in the voice channel to join if you want to play/talk. It was good.
Looking at alternatives I still feel there’s not a lot of competition for discord.
Sure there’s matrix, but from what I gather online it’s not the easiest to set up ( at least the voice ), most people aren’t interested in self hosting this stuff or paying for it. There’s IRC, but that doesn’t have voice chat. Slack/mattermost has voice, but you need to start a call and it doesn’t support 30 people.
Guilded.gg seemed to be a good competitor ( no experience ) but that has been discontinued. Now there’s gamevox.com and rootapp.com that seem to be fighting for that market share.
Moving from one big corp to another though… I’ve looked into self hosting a teamspeak6 server on my vps for friends. Max 32 people. And I’m losing resources on my vps for it.
Discord was going to shite, but they’re speeding up now.
Just a heads up, Gamevox is proprietary and hosts their server with AWS. Root and Teamspeak 6 are also proprietary. None of them are federated.
I’d suggest looking at this to see why a federated FLOSS option is imperative.
Oh I fully agree. This wasn’t to say we don’t need a federated solution. It’s simply that i did not find any FOSS solution which was readily available.
I tried revolt in the past, but post rebrand their website doesn’t even mention voice anymore. It might be there? The article somewhat confirms part of what I said ( not really many FOSS alternatives which are mature/fill the use-case, let alone distributed ).
Matrix is mature enough but I’ve heard getting voice to work is not that straightforward. It’s also not as simple as registering and building your space. You can self host it, but then you’re responsible for hosting/security/patching/upgrades/… . Which is outside of a large audience their circle of interest. You could rent a matrix server, but that a quick search gives me servers around 50€/month. That is a pretty steep price just for some voice chat with friends. If there’s a proprietary free version people will always just do that. The only ones who don’t are people who do it out of principle.
People will take the path of least resistance, and as it stands I feel proprietary software currently is ahead ( simplicity, features, maturity, … ). The downsides obviously being the fact your data is being sold off. I’d not now then when they’ve reached critical mass and the VC are looking to squeeze to get their investment back with extras.
I mentioned big tech, but I should have said proprietary as it’s not necessarily a big tech alternative.
But yes, I would love to have a distributed FOSS discord-like software I can use with my friends.
But as it stands I can’t even get people to move away from WhatsApp for signal despite the nightmare that is meta. Let alone convincing people to move to something less polished when their friends are using <other tool that is polished, but proprietary>.
Let us hope comes up while there is still momentum.
because most other chat services kind of suck, discord made sure to polish everything up a bit and implement good voice chat in the same package.
I tried it out today, I was impressed. However, what about the mobile experience?
It’s installable as a PWA. After it’s loaded up in your preferred mobile browser, you should be able to open the browser menu (the 3 dots) and add it to your homescreen as its own app (on Firefox Mobile based browsers, it’s the option 'Add app to Homescreen), so that it doesn’t load the browser UI.
There are native mobile XMPP apps too that you can use with the same account, such as Monocles (Android) or Monal (iPhone) but they’re not yet quite as full featured as the Movim client (they can’t yet do group calls or screenshare, but can do 1 on 1 video calls).
I see. But if it’s a PWA you won’t be getting any notifications?
It supports Webpush, so if you use a browser for the PWA that support that you should be getting notifications. In my experience it isn’t quite as reliable as a native Android app though, but nothing really stops you to have both on your phone connecting to the same account.
🤩
Sounds cool but I’m also tired with yet another messenger. There are already a brazilian other messengers.
I wouldn’t say that no phone number is an advantage, matrix does not use one and it’s a pain to discover people (compared to just using the number)
There are already a brazilian other messengers
Do the brazilian other messengers offer all the same features? I’m honestly having a hard time finding a Discord replacement for my group. This looks promising.
I don’t use discord. I can’t help with that
I’d recommend reading this in-depth article to better understand the current landscape of online community/chat platforms.
Thanks for sharing. It’s a good read
There are already a brazilian other messengers.
That’s true, and it’s a bit of a mess, but if we’re looking for a more permanent home that we won’t need to escape from in a few years, XMPP is pretty much the best long-term option.
I wouldn’t say that no phone number is an advantage, matrix does not use one and it’s a pain to discover people (compared to just using the number)
Discord did not require a phone number, but finding communities was quite easy. Curious how you would use phone numbers to discover new people or communities, unless you mean just finding your own contacts that also joined the service? The use of phone numbers also immediately makes it impossible to be anonymous from the hosting service itself.
I mean discovering my own contacts, friends. Communities is easier, you’re right
Why did discord become so big? Gamers and crypto guys, right? Any other group? Why did discord replace teamspeak? Because it looked cooler, had a fresh approach.
Discord replaced everything else because it had far more features than Teamspeak. Teamspeak can only do voice chats amongst small groups of people in invite-only rooms.
Discord could do public facing discoverable communities with drop-in voice calls, group video calls, group screensharing to stream movies or gameplay to your friends or an entire community of hundreds, markdown enabled text chats. And each of those communities could have categorized collections of chat & drop-in voice rooms with granular permissions for different users, and more recently it added built-in forums as well.
It’s truly a kitchen-sink approach, but the end result was the ability to create both small and large communities, all of which only needed a single account, and all of it streamlined so non-techies could easily use it.
It’s truly a kitchen-sink approach, but the end result was the ability to create both small and large communities, all of which only needed a single account, and all of it streamlined so non-techies could easily use it.
And it also made it easier to have a captive audience, because when you have a kitchen sink app, any potential competitor has to build an entire house to support their in-house solution. So it makes harder to escape corporate jails, and honestly it’s not something that we should be promoting.
That comment was not a promotion of Discord, but a realistic assessment of its capabilities. Those same capabilities are being implemented in Movim (which I am promoting), which is FLOSS, and built on open standards from 1999 that would make an outside corporate takeover very difficult.
Unless you mean that even full-featured FLOSS software that’s difficult to re-create are equally capable of creating a captive audience/walled garden and should be avoided? In which case, wouldn’t that include things like GIMP, Krita, or even the Linux kernel itself?
So you’re saying people shouldn’t want nice features?
Not really, more like they shouldn’t want them all in the same place / under the same provider. Don’t put all the eggs in the same basket in this digital day and age and all that.
Discord is also big because of fandom culture. From anime, idol, musics, tech, sports, learning, etc. There are type of communication that only possible on Discord. Telegram, WhatsApp, Line, or any chat apps cannot replace these approach. That’s why so many software right now trying to immitate them.
It’s not “yet another messenger”, it’s an expansion of an existing software frontend of a very old messenger (Jabber).
