155
It's quite an impressive little app. Under the hood, it's an advanced XMPP client that has:
- 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 (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 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 cropos won't be able to take it over. It'll be community-owned forever.
In message-mode, it looks fairly similar to Discord:
If you're curious if it'd work as a Discord replacement, it's still missing Discord-like servers with collections of rooms in them, as well as drop-in voice rooms. However, the developer is actively working on implementing those features, with the server w/rooms part likely to be implemented within the next few weeks. They already posted what it looks like in the development branch:
To stay updated on its progress, the !xmpp@slrpnk.net community pretty reliably posts news about it.
Any idea if it's forever meant to be PWA or is there a chance for propper android/linux app?
I know it's possible to use apps like Conversation or Dino, but how does that work with those extra movim bits apart base xmpp?
Due to the architecture of Movim with parts of it running on the server a "proper" app wouldn't make much sense. On the plus side this also means it is very lightweight in the browser, unlike JS heavy browser apps or Electron wrappers.
But since Movim is fully XMPP standard compliant, you can use a native XMPP Android app like Monocles Chat with the same account and have most features included in it as well.
It's technically possible that native Movim apps could be built in the future, but it'd probably be a bit too much for the dev to tackle without additional help.
The other clients can interact with each other without any special actions, similar to how Lemmy and Piefed users can. And you can use 1 XMPP account and log into any client, and it will retain your contacts and message history across them all. However:
If a Conversations user wanted to message a user currently using Movim, they would just need to add their username as a contact (Something@YourXMPPhost[.]com, just like Lemmy works), and the Movim user would get a notification just like they would if it'd come from a Movim user, and they can begin chatting or initiate a 1-on-1 call.
PWA > App.
Well, yes and no. My phone has problem with most PWA though, kinda sucks.
I tried movim a few months ago, had to drop it due to the lack of apps
What would you need apps for? PWAs and pinned browser tabs work just the same. And also you can just use any other xmpp app with your Movim account.
I was looking for a Whatsapp/Telegram replacement to use with my girlfriend. Apps are needed to make calls. I ended up using DeltaChat
https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/763572/looking-for-a-federated-alternative-to-signal-as-they-might-have-to-comply-with-chatcontro
From that post
I really liked DeltaChat also but had difficulty convincing others to use it. Somehow it makes me happy to hear that you've adopted it!
The very easy onboarding really helps!