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.
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.