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.
Only if you need to screenshare with audio! And only because that feature was just implemented (Firefox uses a different mechanism to screenshare with audio, and likely requires its own implementation). Movim works fine otherwise in Firefox or Librewolf.
And remember, Discord itself is just an Electron app, which is literally just a stripped down Chromium browser without the browser controls, but is also itself spyware. Running Movim in a de-googled chromium is a huge step up, and running it in Firefox even more so. I think it’s important not to make perfect be the enemy of good, in this case :)