It is now possible to change your #Movim #blog privacy level using a new setting in the Configuration page.

All the Movim blogs used to be restricted to the users following them, now you can give access to your content to everyone visiting it 🥳

You can also know if a blog is restricted or not by visiting it.

Enjoy this new #feature !

A few days after the official 0.21, we are releasing a 0.21.1 containing a few small fixes.

This version fixes an Opcache related issue that was creating trouble with PHP 8.1, see #1183 for more information.

Movim only load the only required PDO database driver configured in the .env configuration file (see #1193).

And finally a few elements were added in the ?infos page to complete the #integration with join.movim.eu. To add your instance on the website you will need to have, at least, this version of #Movim.

That's all folks !

We are happy to introduce Join Movim 🥳

Discover and explore all the existing public Movim servers and add yours to expand even more the federated network 🌍 !

An up-to-date Movim instance is required if you want to add yours to the list. The registration process is quite straightforward. The servers list is refreshed each hour.

#Movim #XMPP #federation #join

Movim 0.21, codename Whipple, is finally out!

Let's have a look of all the new and improved things that you can find in this big #release 🥳

Message replies

You can now reply to messages thanks to the implementation of the XEP-0461: Message Replies.

More and more clients in the XMPP ecosystem supports this feature, including Slidge, new XMPP gateways project that is allowing you to bridge Movim with Telegram, Discord and many others chat platforms.

Push Notifications

Movim now integrates WebPush. Never miss a message, even when Movim is closed. This feature is also working when you install Movim as a Progressive Web App on your Android or iOS device.

Improved account configuration

The configuration panel has been redesigned to be more accessible.

You can now block contacts directly from your Movim instance and manage your block-list from the panel.

Microphones and webcams can also be configured and tested from the Audio & Video configuration tab.

New emojis

This version brings the support of Unicode 14 and many new emojis that you can use in your messages, posts, replies and reactions.

Redesign

Movim is following the #Material Design guidelines since 2014. This release is bringing a fresh redesign of the components and animations based on Material 3.

The main menu was reorganized to clarify the navigation and hide the second-level pages in a sub-menu that appears when hovering the account item.

Following this redesign Movim accounts can now set a banner next to their avatars.

Share and Send To

The Send To feature, that allows you to send articles to contacts was completed by a Share feature allowing you to share the article in a new publication on your personnal blog on in a Community that you're in. Useful to share things around !

Audio messages

Movim can now play and record #audio messages.

Gallery Communities

When creating or configuring your Communities you can now set a Community type. The Gallery Community forces the publications to contain at least one image and display them as a grid.

This feature is the result of a long clarification and standardization work made on XMPP Pubsub with the pubsub#type attribute, the introduction of a new XEP based on that change called XEP-0472: Pubsub Social Feed and the support of pubsub#type in ejabberd (related ticket).

Performances, memory consumption and stability

A very important work was done to limit the Movim processes memory consumption.

The daemon and subprocesses are now using PHP Opcache to load and share only once lots of files that were previously loaded multiple time during the Movim runtime. PHP modules are also loaded using a predefined whitelist to limit the usage of useless modules in memory.

DotEnv configuration

The old configuration system has been moved to the DotEnv standard. This change merges all the previous configuration (database, daemon and paths) into an unique .env file.

They can also be set using environment variable directly in your Docker Compose, or Web Server (using SetEnvin Apache for example).

The official Movim Docker image was also updated to fit those changes.

Migration from Movim 0.20

If you are planning to upgrade your current Movim instance please follow those few steps:

1. Copy and rename the .env.example file in .env and complete the few configuration variables in it. They should be the same as the one you set in the previous db.inc.php file and your daemon parameters.
2. Remove the db.inc.php file
3. Remove all the daemon.php parameters from your init.d, systemd services or other scripts. The daemon launch command should look this way: $ php daemon.php start.

...and as always, don't forget to run the migrations (php composer.phar movim:migrate) and restart your daemon.

XMPP Pubsub node security and restrictions

Movim 0.21 is not trusting anymore posts, likes and comments that are not containing the explicit identifier (Jabber ID) of the publisher and therefore now rely on this part of the XEP-0060: Pubblish-Subscribe - 12.16 Associating Events and Payloads with the Generating Entity.

All the existing likes and comments might be not counted anymore or seen as "Non trusted" ones. All the new published ones will be configured properly.

Migration from Movim 0.20

On ejabberd

You can update all the existing stored node configuration to force the new default configuration using the following SQL request. You might do a backup of your database before doing such changes:

update pubsub_node_option set val = `publisher` where name = `itemreply` and val = `none`

...and load those changes without restarting ejabberd:

$ ejabberdctl clear-cache

On Prosody

Ensure that you have the expose_publisher = true set in your configuration, see the related documentation.

What's next?

Movim 0.22 should include two big projects.

OMEMO rewrite ?

The cleanup, rewrite and refactoring of the OMEMO support that is quite buggy and not opmized. We are not promising anything on this side, OMEMO is always a complex beast to handle.

Multi-part audio and video-conference feature

The audio and video conferencing features were already introduced a few years ago in Movim. Some preparation work has been done in this 0.21 release to be able merge back the pop-up video-conference window inside the main window for the upcoming release.

The multi-part audio and video-conference feature is also one of the main feature that miss in Movim and is requested quite often by our users. Let's see if Movim 0.22 finally include this long awaited #feature.

Regarding the amount of work that need to be done regarding those features it might be possible that specific funding will be requested for it to free up enough time to work properly on their integration.

Enjoy!

A big thanks to the #Movim community that is growing more than ever. You can find us on our main support chatroom movim@conference.movim.eu.

If you find issues or if you want to contribute to the project you can find everything on our Github page.

And if you want to support us, fund the development of new features and help us pay our servers, domains and communication we are actively looking for supporters and sponsors on our Patreon.

That's all folks!

Movim is joining the Mastodon network you can follow us on @movim@piaille.fr to stay informed of our latest news or you can continue to follow our official blog as well 😋

We also totally refreshed our Patreon page and introduced two new membership levels, Supporter and Sponsor. If you want to help Movim and fund our development do not hesitate to support us there.

We would really like to first cover our monthly expenses (servers, domains…) and if we get enough support be able to fund some new features such as group-videoconferencing 🥰

#Patreon #Mastodon #Sponsor #Support #Movim

Bye bye Facebook, bye bye Twitter, the federated platforms are ready to take over!

The whole Fediverse is booming, Mastodon looks like a really promising replacement for the little blue bird and Peertube to replace Youtube. Many other platforms are currently being developed around the ActivityPub ecosystem like explained in this article The Fediverse is so much bigger than Mastodon.

We think that Movim also fit perfectly in there by being a perfect blogging and chatting platform. Fully built on the widely used Internet standard XMPP it is packed with plenty of exciting features in a nice and friendly user interface.

The Libervia project is actually working on a bridge between ActivityPub (the Fediverse core protocol) and XMPP which would allow us to connect all those exciting platforms with Movim!

Feel free to share the word to help us!

We are just at the beginning of this exciting journey :)

edhelas

#movim #xmpp #activitypub #fediverse #mastodon #libervia #twitter #facebook

I was used to #release a new version of #Movim twice a year. Skiff is an exception. One year of work was required to release the 20th major version of the project.

The main reason is mostly based on the amount of work and adjustments required to integrate the main feature of this release: the support of end-to-end #encryption through the implementation of OMEMO.

So let's dive in all the new exciting features that you will discover in this major release.

OMEMO

The technical part was already extensively covered by the dedicated article End to end encryption in Movim - OMEMO is (finally) there!.

The user experience and flow is not very different than on other XMPP clients, if Movim detects that you can start an encrypted conversation with a contact a small lock icon will be displayed next to the chatbox. You can always choose to toggle it back to have a non-encrypted discussion.

It is also possible to see all the encryption fingerprints in the Contact drawer under the dedicated "Fingerprints" tab. You can also enable and disable encryption to each fingerprint manually there. Movim is displaying the last message sent or received and the client linked to the fingerprint to help you with your configuration. But rest assured, those settings are only for those that wants to configure in detail their encryption levels.

End-to-end encryption is also available for group chats, the flow is exactly the same as for single contacts.

There is some chances that you encounter encryption issues in some cases, even after a lot of debug and refactoring end-to-end encryption is a really complex beast that is difficult to handle. Feel free to open a ticket with all the details to reproduce the issue if you encounter one.

I'd like to thank again NLNet for their help on this project ! With the funding I was able to free-up time to finally integrate end-to-end encryption in Movim.

Posts

A few changes were made regarding the posts and their integration within Movim.

The post publication form was slightly redesigned and now allows several images, files or links to be attached. Linked to that change, post cards were also redesigned with a more compact design.

The public Communities and Blog pages now have the same 2-columns design as their private version. The displayed Communities and Contacts information are also now more compact.

The tags were redesigned and are now more clearly visible and navigable.

Chat

The contacts and chatrooms drawers were redesigned and now include some really useful information. Pictures and links sent in conversations are now quickly available in dedicated tabs.

Chat bubbles are now properly displaying quotes and support message styling.

A big refactoring was also done regarding how the edited messages are handled in Movim. This refactoring allowed messages to be edited in Group Chats and the support of several edits on a single message (which caused some weird message duplication bug).

Chatrooms

Chatrooms administrators can now manage affiliations and ban/unban users.

You can now prioritize your most important chatrooms on top of the list with the pin feature.

...and many other things

The old Movim API code was fully removed. It had been left untouched for years and not really used nor up-to-date anymore.

When you are in a chat conversation, the other chats counter is displayed on the back button.

The internal picture library was rewritten and simplified, it now supports transparent avatars. All pictures are now compressed in WebP by default.

Admins can now fully disable the registration feature. It is quite useful if you have a dedicated Movim setup and a specific separated flow to register your users (using an internal LDAP in a company or school for example).

Plenty of new emojis were integrated with the support of Unicode 13.0.

Movim is now a Progressive Web App

Movim used to have some "native" apps, on desktop and Android. All those app are now deprecated and replaced by work that was done to make Movim a full Progressive Web App. From any browsers you can now install Movim as an app on your phone or desktop in a single click.

Conclusion

Lots of other small improvements and features were integrated in this release but not listed there, it's time for you to discover them. Enjoy this new version!

That's all folks!