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.
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.