It’s more than two years ago that I started using the social network #Movim after a tip from an acquaintance. I had left G+ and never wanted to use a centralized social media platform again. I tried Mastodon and Friendica, Diaspora and Movim but eventually I kept using Movim and Mastodon with my Friendica account as a back-up for Mastodon. The secret of Movim is tranquillity. After logging in for the first time the news stream is empty, much like Diaspora, and it only gets filled with post from people that you follow, communities that you subscribe to and rss feeds. This in combination with an easy to use chat option that gives access to whole #XMPP network makes Movim very powerful.
It’s also incredibly easy to create a community in Movim, although I think community isn’t the most appropriate description here. It’s more a blog from one or more persons where other users can subscribe to, like and comment in a linear fashion.
I recently introduced my wife to Movim and the first thing that surprised her is that, contrary to FB, the news stream contained articles worth reading instead of ads and other bs. She also liked the fact that she could use any XMPP-client for chat. Time will tell if she’ll keep using it but her initial enthusiasm was very encouraging.
Although, I’m pretty psyched about Movim I would like to see some features. First, coming back to the tranquillity, when in the news stream on the right side five posts of other Movim users appear. I suppose that this is meant for discovery and that’s great but in some of the posts I’m less interested but I can’t block or hide these posts.
Also there is no way to block or hide a person entirely. This may become a problem since Movim appears to be becoming more and more popular and with that the interaction between people grows exponentially.
Currently I’m lazily using the European server of Movim but I (or anyone else) can deploy a self-hosted instance and I’m tempted to experiment with that. I’ll probably get back to that.
Finally, I want to thank Timothée Jaussoin and other contributors for developing Movim and making it available to all of us. It’s awesome. And if you read this please consider donating to the Movim project.
Link to my initial thoughts about Movim: https://homehack.nl/movim-floss-alternative-for-hangouts/
Thanks for reading!