
Movim 0.16 – A federated web-based social XMPP client - edhelas
https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/e10a8998-5e4d-4b52-9b9e-2f103b446d94
======
dijit
Off-topic: I wonder why XMPP didn't take off.

Most people attribute it to the lack of standardisation regarding server
implementations, or "which XEPs can I support" but normally when those
situations happen a single set of things takes off because it's highly
polished or packaged as a bundle.

It feels like we were -nearly- there with regards to decentralised IM, but
then suddenly we regressed to walled gardens and now I have 10 applications on
my phone to communicate with people, each with their own account and very
little cross over.

~~~
pmlnr
Because there are too many clients with a wide range of supported/unsupported
features.

The only solution out there that supports cross platform JINGLE is
AstraChat[^1], which is closed source and commercial, but they lack OMEMO and
Carbons.

Conversations on Android has both OMEMO and Carbons, but no audio/video or p2p
transfer files.

Pidgin, Empathy, Gajim, etc are lacking behind with features, though Pidgin
can be made reasonable up to date, still without JINGLE[^2].

Dino[^3] is promising, but it linux only.

I don't know how Trillian is doing these days.

[^1]: [https://astrachat.com/](https://astrachat.com/)

[^2]: [https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/#adding-
netwo...](https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/#adding-networks-to-
pidgin-technical-details)

[^3]: [https://dino.im/](https://dino.im/)

~~~
upofadown
> ... p2p transfer files ...

XMPP seems to be moving away from that as it is impossible to do reliably with
the current brokenness of the internet. The current hotness involves uploading
the file to the XMPP server and then just providing a https link to the other
client(s). The contents can be encrypted but client support is spotty. So
sometimes you have to trust the server. Still way better than the old thing.

I am personally not at all sad if my IM client can't do audio/video. Just let
me send a damn text message and have it come out at the other end reliably.

~~~
qwerty456127
> XMPP seems to be moving away from that as it is impossible to do reliably
> with the current brokenness of the internet. The current hotness involves
> uploading the file to the XMPP server and then just providing a https link
> to the other client(s).

Could be even more cool if you could just post a file to a group chat and it
would be shared via BitTorrent behind the scenes.

> I am personally not at all sad if my IM client can't do audio/video. Just
> let me send a damn text message and have it come out at the other end
> reliably.

I agree. I can hardly see why texting and voice calling is always meant to be
done with the same app.

------
edhelas
Hi, author of Movim there. Do not hesitate to ask me questions about the
project or XMPP :)

~~~
deepersprout
Hi! How many users do you have on your main pods (nl, de, jp and fi)?

~~~
edhelas
[https://de.movim.eu/?infos](https://de.movim.eu/?infos) 409
[https://jp.mov.im/?infos](https://jp.mov.im/?infos) 133
[https://nl.movim.eu/?infos](https://nl.movim.eu/?infos) 10669

Those are the accounts that already logged in on those pods. You can check the
"currently connected" stats for real time numbers :)

FI is actually down at the moment.

------
rakeshsrr
I still remember writing an XMPP-Client and IRC-Client servers which were
widely used across our organization. Later on, we developed our cloud-based
chat application with mobile apps. Then we had support for xmpp/irc for those
chat apps, eventually dropped the xmpp/irc support too. I think the reason is
major players (Google/FB) dropping the support for xmpp and at the same time
evolution of many cloud-based chat apps. XMPP is well standardized and
documented. If it could have been TEXT based instead of XML many developers
could have adapted (IMAP protocol still being widely adopted).

------
ppjet6
Because nobody said it and everybody is centered on how XMPP is
ugly/beautiful: Congrats for the release :)

------
josteink
I'll be the one to bring about the usual naming nitpick.

With several different vi(m)-implementations around, like neovim, my immediate
assumption was that this was another vim editor-fork.

Another name might help emphasize that this is a chat-related product/service?

~~~
edhelas
Neovim was launched in 2014, Movim in 2009 :) But yeah I got a few people that
told me that that it was a vim fork or something related.

Actually the name contains IM (we have the mov.im domains as well).

Originally the name is an acronym (My Open Virtual Identity Manager) but was
lately abandoned to keep only the main name.

~~~
codetrotter
> we have the mov.im domains as well

I don’t know to what extent the name Movim confuses people, but when I read
the name in the title of this post, before I read the rest I too expected
something related to vim.

If rebranding it as Mov.im is an option, since you already own that domain
name, I suggest considering doing so. Though I guess there is a risk then that
people think of the QuickTime file format instead?

I don’t know what impact such a rebranding would have on search results
rankings but among all possible rebrandings, if any were to be considered, I
would think it would have the least impact at least. And also would involve a
low amount of work since other domain names and such still make sense.

------
buboard
Why this and not converseJS? What are the killer features :)

~~~
jiofih
I think this uses ConverseJS. Converse is not a full featured client on its
own, and will require your own websocket-enabled proxy most of the time since
BOSH is rarely enabled.

~~~
jcbrand
Movim doesn't use Converse. It's an older project than Converse.

> Converse is not a full featured client on its own

I guess that depends on your definition of "full featured", but it has more
features than a lot of other clients.

Most XMPP servers support BOSH and websocket directly and since direct TLS
connections aren't possible in the browser Converse uses those.

If the XMPP server admin doesn't enable BOSH or websocket, that's not really
Converse's fault :)

