After months of work and hundreds of commits, this is the biggest Movim release ever made.

This release massively scales up Movim's architecture while introducing long-awaited, and exclusive, new features and accessiblity improvement. Let's dive in!

Edit: A 0.33.1 was published since then, fixing an issue regarding Spaces. 😉

A Whole Bucket of New Chat Features 😲

Spaces: A New Chatting Experience

For years, one of the main criticisms of XMPP was that it lacked a proper way to group and administrate chatrooms together, as Discord, Slack, or Mattermost allow. In autumn 2025, a base XMPP extension called XEP-0503: Server-side Spaces was drafted. After discussing it with nicoco (the XEP's co-author and maintainer of Slidge) at the latest XMPP Summit in Brussels, a complete implementation was completed in just a few weeks in early 2026.

Movim is the very first XMPP client to support Spaces, and it is already compatible with ejabberd. Prosody support is coming very soon!

If you are curious about how it works and how to set up your XMPP server, a detailed blog post has been published: Let's Talk About Spaces in XMPP 🌌.

Spaces come with a complete redesign of the Movim layout and navigation flow, on both desktop and mobile. Publications, Spaces, and chats are now accessible in one or two clicks thanks to reorganized navigation bars, while secondary elements such as settings and administration have been moved to a dedicated drawer menu.

Shortcuts

The new chat navigation bar also includes Shortcuts. In the top-left corner of your screen, you will find your 3 most recent message notifications, and you can open any conversation directly by clicking on them.

This menu is also accessible from any page on your desktop.

Hats 🎩

It is now possible to create custom roles in your chatrooms and assign them to members. This new feature, called Hats, is based on XEP-0317: Hats, which was rewritten a few months ago.

The feature is still in its early stages and will be improved and integrated into Spaces in the upcoming release.

Swipe to Reply

A small but very useful addition: on mobile, you can now reply to a message by swiping it to the left. Pretty convenient 😋.

Videoconference

Movim continues to improve its video-conferencing capabilities with each release, and Halley brings a number of improvements and fixes.

When multiple browsers are connected to a single Movim session, calls are now properly handled: only one browser can answer or initiate a call at a time, and you can hang up from any of them.

Categorizing Content During Calls

The new XEP-0507: Jingle Content Category allows XMPP clients to define what kind of content they are sharing. For example, your webcam is defined as speaker, while a shared screen is tagged as slides.

This XEP is now implemented in Movim and will be used more extensively in upcoming releases.

Audio and Screen Sharing

When sharing your screen, you can now also share your computer or phone audio. This is particularly useful when streaming a video game or a video to your contacts.

The call layout has also been improved and reorganized for screen sharing sessions.

Architecture and More

Introducing Multi-Session Workers 🚀

Halley brings the biggest architectural change to the project since 2014: multi-session workers.

This is the result of several months of intensive work, touching hundreds of files across the Movim codebase.

Movim is moving from a one-session-per-process architecture to multiple sessions per PHP process. This greatly reduces RAM consumption and database connections with negligible impact on overall performance.

After testing, Movim now handles 8 sessions per worker, roughly 80% less RAM usage compared to the previous version, while maintaining the same speed and stability. A connected user now takes approximately ~10 MB of memory.

A new daemon command provides a clear overview of workers and sessions:

Refactored Notifications

All notifications are now handled through a single unified flow. They are pushed in the background when Movim is closed, or shown in the foreground when it is open.

This refactoring also introduced new features such as action buttons and more detailed notification statuses. You can, for example, directly answer or decline an incoming call from the notification itself.

New Administration Tools

Administrators can now set a maximum limit on the number of connected users for their instance. Even though Movim is now much lighter than before, limiting the number of users on a server can still be useful.

New ClearImagesCache Daemon Command

This admin command clears all internal Movim image caches. Movim normally handles cache clearing on its own, so this command is only needed when you need to rebuild your instance after a crash or significant misconfiguration.

After restarting the daemon and reconnecting XMPP accounts, Movim will attempt to re-download all available pictures from XMPP. This can take time and put significant pressure on the XMPP network on large instances, so it is advised to use this command sparingly.

Improved Accessibility

Following the recommendations from the HAN Accessibility Lab and supported by NLNet funding, I undertook a significant rewrite of several interface components to better support visually impaired users and screen readers.

While there is still work ahead, the core layout and main features now offer much improved keyboard navigation.

Feedback is very welcome! If you have suggestions or run into any issues, please open a ticket on GitHub.

Introducing Miho and Stash, Our Two New Mascots!

This major release doesn't just bring new features, it also comes with a new logo and two new mascots ✨

The logo has been simplified and modernized, and now fits much better across all configurations:

Miho and Stash, illustrated by the very talented Rimou, now grace the redesigned website and will be part of Movim's visual identity for years to come 😸.

This release also includes an exclusive pack of 16 new stickers to celebrate the occasion!

A Big Funding Campaign for 2026!

For the past 15 years, I have been dedicating my free time to maintaining Movim, and I hope to continue doing so for many years to come.

Each year, I incur various expenses to keep the project running. I also travel by train to attend hackathons where I can discuss the XMPP protocol and contribute to Movim's development.

Additionally, since 2018, I have reduced my regular work schedule to 80% in order to dedicate at least one day per week to the project.

I wrote a detailed blog post outlining the costs and goals for this year: Fund Movim in 2026 to Reach the Goals.

If you'd like to help me spend more time on Movim and keep bringing exciting new features, please check out the Fund Movim section on the official website.

That's all, folks! ✨

#movim #xmpp #release #spaces