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 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.