So it seems that we doubled our daily registrations the past few days 🎉 .

Thanks to #WhatsApp lots of new people are discovering XMPP and its ecosystem . We also recently rolled-out an improved and simplified flow for the registration process. You can find it there Register on movim.eu and share the link around.

We will also communicate soon about some big news about #Movim itself, stay tuned 😉

A lot of new exciting features were added to #Movim the past few weeks! Like Chat Reply, that allows you to quickly quote and reply to an exisiting message in a one to one or chatroom discussion.

It is now also possible to search and add GIFs within the discussions thanks to the Tenor integration. This feature is totally optional. The administrator can easily enable it by adding the #Tenor API key within the Movim admin panel (don't forget to restart the daemon).

The embedding feature was also greatly improved. Movim now resolves video urls, pictures as well as general website URLs to embed them properly within the chat! Some improvements in the picture preview feature now also allows you to preview pictures from the embedded url quickly before visiting it.

And finally, some improvements were made to the picture proxy feature. To simplify, Movim is protecting its users by serving the externally shared pictures (from Internet websites for example) and acting as an intermediary. It also automatically recompress the pictures if they are too large.

Server administrators that are hosting a Movim pod can now easily setup a cache system allowing those Movim proxyfied pictures to be kept for a while and reduce the load on the Movim side. For example, if someone is sharing a large picture URL in a chatroom, the first time Movim will display it to a member, it will recompress it and keep it in a cache, the other users will then directly request the cached version and load it instantly.

The One-Page-Setup wiki page has been updated to explain how to setup that cache easily.

With all those new features Movim is now ready to compete with other web chat platforms such as #WhatsApp or #Discord. But with the power of decentralisation, standard and build on open-source technologies.

It also seems that a big feature might be planned for 2021, stay tuned ;)

If you enjoy Movim and want to help funding the project, you can help us on Patreon. This will allow us to cover our monthly expenses and fund some new features.

Thanks again for your support!

That's all folks !

In 2017, after some discussions with the #Jappix owner, the Movim team handled the administration of the jappix.com XMPP server and its 17.500 users.

Since that time, it was not possible to create a jappix.com account anymore (only the exisiting users were able to login).

A little upgrade of our registration form is now allowing you to register jappix.com accounts as well as the existing movim.eu ones.

And as expected, all the jappix.com #accounts can experience the same features as the movim.eu ones :)

Enjoy!

A new useful #feature has been merged into Movim today. It will also be part of the upcoming 0.19 #release.

This change relies on the standard XEP-0201: Best Practices for Message Threads and allows you to #reply to a chat message using any XMPP account using Movim.

You could already find such feature on other chat platforms like #Telegram or #WhatsApp, the flow is also quite similar: on supported messages, click on the reply button and a little preview will appear next to the chat box input, fill in your message, publish, et voilà !

You can also navigate to the original message by clicking on the little preview (if this message is currently shown in the conversation).

Enjoy :)

A few days ago I discovered that the #Eloquent database library (the one that Movim is using for a few years now) had some events that could be caught by an event listener.

With this simple mechanism #Movim could be aware of when exactly a #SQL request is done during the execution time.

The Movim #architecture is based on several processes that talk to each others, and each connected session (each user connected to a specific XMPP account) is having its own sub-process. The main issue with this architecture is that all those processes relies on a common database (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and each process open an unique connection to the database. See How's Movim made? Part I - The Architecture to know more about this architecture.

When you start to have a lot of users connected on the same instance, this is opening lots of connections to the database. This is creating a congestion and can slow down the general performances.

This simple commit ask Eloquent to close the connection after a few seconds of inactivity. Eloquent is reconnecting automatically if a new SQL request is made after the disconnection. This allows to free-up the socket resources once "we don't really need it anymore".

And here is the result once this commit deployed on nl.movim.eu

It's been six months since the last #release, and for the 0.18 – Oterma one there's a lot to show!

So let's dive in this list of exciting features and changes that you will find in this new release.

Notifications

0.18 is coming with quite some changes regarding how the notifications are handled and displayed within Movim. This also came with lots of bug fixes to ensure that the counters are up-to-date everywhere across the UI and between all the devices.

One of the first notable changes you will find is how the global chat counter is behaving. This counter is now displaying the total number of unread discussions and not the total number of unread chat messages anymore.

Related to this change, an update on the chatrooms bookmark specifications is now allowing you to save a per-chatroom notification configuration. With this new feature you'll be able to choose, for each chatroom, if you want to “always be notified” for each new messages, “only when you're mentioned”, or “never”.

Movim can now use sound to notify you of a new incoming message, if you allow it to (see the configuration panel).

Stickers, drawing and emojis

We also improved some existing chat features. Some work has been done by Christine Ho on the Draw widget. The drawn lines are now smoother, even on large resolution pictures. The feature has also been extended to allow you to draw on existing pictures you upload from your device.

Christine Ho also improved the existing emoji picker to add useful search bar, you can find it when trying to add a reaction bellow a message.

A new pack of fresh meme stickers was also added to the stickers panel.

And finally, the Movim emojis support has been updated to Unicode 12.0, bringing a pack of new emojis in.

Video conferencing

A big part of the time spent on this release was focused on the video-conference features. The related code was heavily reworked to ensure a smooth compatibility with the #Conversations Android client, it's still not perfect but works already quite well.

This was especially because of the integration of XEP-0215: External Service Discovery in the project. Allowing the web browser to easily perform STUN/TURN discovery (it's a way to discover alternative routes on the Internet for the video and audio feeds to be streamed on) using the #XMPP server services.

The call flow was also split to conveniently allow audio-only calls.

And the screen-sharing feature was integrated on the video-side. Useful when you want to quickly show a document or a presentation during your call!

Video-conferencing is hard. For this release we made quite a lot of work to improve the user experience but we are still not totally satisfied with the result. Some more work will be needed in the upcoming releases to really deliver the best we can offer for that feature.

And a many other things…

Chat and chatrooms

The interfaces between the chat and chatrooms (header bar, drawer menu) are now unified to display general information the same way. A little gallery was added which displays recently sent and received pictures.

The pictures handling in chat messages has been improved. Movim is now trying to resolve picture URLs, even if they were sent using a client that doesn't embed pictures in messages.

The scrolling behavior in chat was greatly improved and simplified, a little "go to bottom" button was also added.

Movim now handles the XEP-0319: Last User Interaction and can therefore be more precise to tell you the last time your contacts were seen active.

Post publication

Movim was already automatically saving your draft posts while you were writing, but since this version it actually displays when a draft has been saved. The post publication panel was also slightly redesigned to be clearer and more accessible.

Performance

On the technical side, a PresenceBuffer system was added to handle wave of presences coming from the network and mass insert them in the SQL DB. This reduces by a factor of 10 to 100 the number of requests that are done to the database during those "spikes" of incoming presences from the network. This little feature greatly improves logins speed and shortens the time it takes to join a new chatroom.

Favicon

The favico.js library, that was handling the little counter in the browser tab icons had been removed and rewritten using only vanilla JavaScript, keeping only the required bits which also made it way smaller. This was actually the last (external) JavaScript dependency coming with Movim.

XMPP Authentication

Regarding the authentication process, Movim now supports XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS to directly connect to XMPP using an encrypted socket (better than the historical STARTTLS negociation system that is still used as a fallback mechanism). Regarding the IP resolution Movim now uses the Happy Eyeballs mechanism to resolve the server IP on IPv4 or IPv6.

Android application

Finally, the official Android app gained nice features thanks to the improved integration of Movim on your phone.

The notification handler has been reworked to handle newer Android versions, conversations are now stacked properly.

From any application you can now share a URL to Movim directly and publish it in a Post. In the future we are planning to add more sharing capabilities like this one (share to contacts or chatrooms for example).

Related to the video-conferencing improvements, audio and video calls are now launched in a separate task to allow you to switch back easily to your chat or publications while having your call. This makes it close to the experience you can already have on desktop.

Finally some work was done in #Movim and on the Android app to improve the general performance, especially regarding the touch features and general responsiveness.

To conclude…

As always you can test all those features on our official pod, or deploy them in a few steps on your own server :)

We always need some funding to help us promoting Movim and covering project costs, feel free to help on our Patreon.

And stay tuned for the upcoming releases, it seems that there are some interesting features already planned ;)

That's all folks!

Thanks to the awesome work of Singpolyma there is now a bridge between the #XMPP and the #SIP networks. Both standards are able to exchange information to setup audio calls.

A few things were fixed in Movim to do so (mostly related to the format of the account identifiers used for the protocol bridge system) but now everything seems to work fine. You can find the tool at this address: git.singpolyma.net/cheogram-sip. It is still in heavy development but it progressing quite rapidly.

Here is the same call from Movim and the #Linphone SIP client. Calls are also working with the Conversations client as well.

More than a simple tech demo, this can bring quite a lot of useful possibilities. SIP is widely deployed especially in telephony. Calling a remote IP phone directly from your XMPP account could be really convenient.

Using a simple movim.eu account nowadays you can already connect to several other networks, such as IRC or Telegram and group everything in one UI. Having SIP on top really brings the whole experience to another level.

Have fun with Movim and movim.eu and don't forget to support the project by sharing links around!

The movim.eu #XMPP server now supports connections through #WebSockets.

This means that if you're using a #web client like conversejs, you'll be able to connect directly using your movim.eu account.

If you are a #Movim user. Nothing changes as Movim is using standard good ol' TCP/TLS connections to login 😉

The clients that wants to connect to movim.eu using WebSockets will normally automatically discovers the endpoint (using the related XEPs). If not, it is available manualy at wss://movim.eu/xmpp.

That's all folks!

Thanks for your support!

The 0.18 release is coming soon. I'm doing a few more optimisations and adding some last features for the 0.18 (such as the "last seen" feature, drawing on images before uploading them, UI improvements…) along the other exciting ones (video-conferencing, screen sharing, big performances improvement, Unicode 12.0 emojis support…).

I'm working on Movim for more than 11 years now. In a few days we will reach 8K commits on the main repository.

And after all those years of work, on my free time, my goal hasn't changed: deliver a simple, good looking, light and accessible communication platform for everyone.

Movim has been and will always be a Free Software and I'm doing my best to keep the code light, optimized and simple to allow it to run on a maximum of devices, even low end ones.

If you want to support the project, you can always help us by giving a bit on the Patreon page. This money is for the moment just covering the server and domains expenses. A bit more could allow me to fund some nice stuff such as new stickers pack (like the 3 other ones that are now in the project) or real stickers and goodies… or cover my travel expenses to do conferences and presentations around Europe (not in the upcoming months unfortunately, you know why…).

Have fun with Movim !

edhelas