When I started looking at Discord alternatives last year, I also found Movim. Back then, I didn’t really understood what it was about, only that it was somehow connected to XMPP. Since then, both the development of Movim as well as its website have progressed, so I can now tell you more about it.
The home screen (in French). If you’re not interested in things beyond chat, you can also set Movim to go straight for the chat rooms. Oh, and Movim is also available in other languages than French.
Movim runs in your web browser and offers text chats, (micro-)blogging, time-limited “stories”, newsfeeds, video calls & conferencing. It’s open source and federated, so you can communicate between different servers and host your own. You can run it in your browser or as a PWA (Progressive Web App), so you can use the same client on your desktop computers, tablets and phones. It’s all based on the XMPP standard, though – so you can also use other XMPP clients if you’d like. That’s a pretty good offer!
The „Explore“ screen on a mobile device. Somebody is just discovering xkcd.
Chats come in roughly three flavours:
A direct chat is a chat between two participants. The chat can be encrypted and nobody else can join it – it’s a one-on-one conversation. You can see the ID or address of your dialogue partner, which makes sense because you need to know that one to start a direct chat in the first place 😀
A private group chat (or MUC – Multi User Chat) is a discussion between a certain group of people. You can only join these kind of chats by invitation, and you can specify if this kind of invitation should still be possible after the initial setup.
A public group chat is a chat that can be joined by anyone who knows the address of the chat. You can decide if this room is supposed to show up in a room directory like search.jabber.network or not, and you can set if other participants should be able to see each others addresses (or JIDs – Jabber IDs) or write private messages to each other, or only to moderators, or not at all. There’s also a moderated mode, so newcomers can’t start talking before a moderator explicitly allowed that (or gave them „voice“).
Rooms have predefined roles that can’t be fine-tuned themselves. However, I found the room settings completely adequate to set things like „everyone can change the channel topic, but only moderators can kick people out of the channel“.
A chat room in Movim with contacts and rooms listed on the side
Comparing this to a protocol like Matrix, the chat features are a bit more simple. I already mentioned the less granular control over user privileges. There’s also the absence of threads, so while you can mention a user, quote or reply to a message (or everything all at once), you better start your own breakout room if you want to discuss a topic in longer detail.
Another thing that stood out to me is that there are no room clusters yet, so nothing like a Matrix space or a Discord guild. While you can decide what rooms should be pinned to your list, which ones should notify you (when you’ve been mentioned or for every new message) and which ones should be joined at login, you can’t create room collections in Movim yet. I say „yet“ because there is an extension of XMPP in development by Movim that aims to solve exactly that. By the looks of it, it will also be released sometime this year. This might make your channel list look a bit chaotic, but so far the communities I’ve joined handled that rather well. If you joined 100 Discord servers and checked out 250 channels each, the same collection of rooms would probably overwhelm you in Movim, though. On the other hand, I’m not sure how you managed not getting overwhelmed so far without just ignoring most of the channels. 😀
Another thing to keep in mind is that XMPP works a bit differently in terms of message storage than you might expect when being used to protocols like Matrix. Messages are usually stored on the server – although you can set your room to not do that – and synced between clients, but XMPP isn’t really designed as a message archive. So while you can always catch the last messages to catch up or know what people are about right now, you can not expect to join a room and read through the last months of conversations. If you were invited to an encrypted room, you can’t even read any messages from before you joined at all! I’ve used Movim to hang out in a bunch of discussion rooms and while there is a message search that is pretty reliable and quick (especially compared to what I’m used to from Discord and Matrix), nobody ever told me to search the channel for X because they talked about that a while back. To be honest, that is a huge relief for me, but maybe some people actually like spending hours hunting down messages in a chat system.
All in all, I’m both impressed and optimistic about Movim and enjoy using it. I think I might open up a few chat rooms there as well. Maybe we meet there!