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.

  • 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.