News is spreading that Google will replace classic Hangouts with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Since Google had already decided to close G+ forcing me to look for an alternative this was a good moment replace Hangouts with a FLOSS alternative. I’m pretty happy with the Fediverse social networks as a replacement for G+ but I haven’t been able to find a chat service in the Fediverse. Luckily there are other FLOSS options. Two of those are Matrix and Movim. I briefly checked the Riot client of Matrix as a guest so I can’t tell much about it. Maybe later more on that. I’ve spend a considerable amount of time with Movim which is actually more than just a webbased chat service. Movim is a distributed social network built on top of XMPP.
XMPP
XMPP is a communication protocol. It is, unlike for instance ActivityPub, a real-time protocol and therefore suitable for message oriented services like chat or IM. It’s an open protocol so any developer willing can use it in his/her application. There’s a sizeable list of application that support XMPP ranging from apps for the mobile phone to web oriented services.
Movim
Being build on top of XMPP, Movim has a good chat capability. You can create a public chatroom that anyone can join or have a private chat with another person. It also enables the user to create a community (or more) and a news stream. An advantage of Movim using the XMPP protocol is that with an Movim account you’re able to communicate with anyone with an XMPP account not just with Movim. To give an example I’ve been exchanging messages with someone that uses a Friendica server with a XMPP addon.
Movim is completely federated due to the underlying XMPP protocol which means that even when a server goes down the network keeps functioning and you’re still able to chat with your friends, as long as they were not logged into that specific server of course. The federated structure also provides privacy for the user. Your information is kept only on your XMPP server and information is being shared with other servers only if you decided to share it.
In the current version of Movim (0.14) end-to-end encryption is not implemented but it is planned for the next version. This means that currently Movim is not suitable if you need secure communication.
If you want more in-depth explanation about Movim and the technical choices that were being made check out this blog post from the developer of Movim: https://fr.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas@movim.eu/how-s-made-movim-part-i-the-architecture-CCA7If
You can check it out here: https://movim.eu/?lang=fr&hl=fr
Thanks for reading!