Movim – Responsive web-based cross-platform XMPP client
movim.eu
Movim is a kickass distributed blogging and messaging platform built on the industry-standard XMPP protocol

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.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
        10·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
            7·
            3 days ago

            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?

            • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              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.

      • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip
        1·
        3 days ago

        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.