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.
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.