The past few months have been hectic! In February, the "Bye Bye Discord 👋, Hello Movim ✨" Campaign was launched, along with a dedicated fundraiser.

Movim 0.33 "Halley" (and 0.33.1) were released, laying the foundations of Spaces, a very important architectural change that allows Movim to scale much more efficiently on servers, along with many fixes regarding video conferencing.

Current Fundraising Status

We reached the first goal of €1,700! This means the basic costs of the project are now covered, and I can start freeing up time to focus on upcoming new features.

I'd love to see if I can reach at least one fully dedicated day per month for Movim, two would be even better! If you want to support me on this journey, don't hesitate to join the fundraising campaign.

The final goals haven't changed; in fact, they are now more clearly defined.

The XMPP Alps Hackathon ⛰️🧑‍💻

I organized a fantastic hackathon at my place with the Dino and Slidge developers! We focused especially on integrating XEP-0463: MUC Affiliations Versioning, a XEP that will greatly help reduce the load on Movim when joining rooms (and especially Spaces!).

We also had two major discussions about Spaces, the XEP was updated based on what we decided, and about Muji, which helped clarify how it was integrated into Movim.

We also enjoyed some great food 🧀 and a lovely hike in the mountains 🥾! Hiking while discussing XEPs and protocols, what a great idea 😁.

So, What's Next? The 2nd Milestone!

In the coming months, I'll focus on extending the freshly introduced features and bringing some exciting new ones.

Spaces

Spaces are now in Movim, I wrote a detailed blog post about them: Let's Talk About Spaces in XMPP 🌌.

During the hackathon, we discussed a way to attach an avatar and banner to a Space. This is now defined in a dedicated section and reuses User Avatar (XEP-0084). Movim will be updated to support this.

Bookmark Sorting

We also found a way to allow the reordering of bookmarks and a way to store them in directories. I'll update XEP-0469: Bookmark Pinning to support these new features.

By adding a <sorted/> element in a bookmark extension like this:

<sorted xmlns="urn:xmpp:bookmarks-sorting:0" directory="General" directory-rank="2.6" rank="1.5"/>

This will allow Space administrators to define the order of their Space chatrooms and organize them into directories.

nicoco is planning to add all these Space-related features to the Slidge bridges (especially the Discord one), allowing Movim to synchronize with Discord servers in a completely standardized way.

I'll also update XEP-0330: Pubsub Subscription to make XEP-0402: PEP Native Bookmarks extensions compatible with it. It should look something like this:

<subscription xmlns="urn:xmpp:pubsub:subscription:1" server="pubsub.shakespeare.lit" node="party">
    <title>Party at the Capulets</title>
    <extensions>
        <sorted xmlns="urn:xmpp:bookmarks-sorting:0" directory="General" directory-rank="2.6" rank="1.5"/>
    </extensions>
</subscription>

This means we'll also be able to organize and sort all our bookmarks this way and synchronize them across clients!

All of this will be possible simply by reusing XEPs with one another, XMPP is all about Lego bricks and creativity ♻️!

Muji Upgrade in Movim

During the hackathon, I also had a great discussion with Marvin Wißfeld from the Dino project about Muji.

In the upcoming version, the Muji integration, currently based on invitations, will be greatly simplified. At the moment, when you initiate a multi-party audio or video call, a new chatroom is created and people are invited to it. In Movim, this is always initiated from an existing chatroom.

The refactoring will allow Muji calls to start directly in the main chatroom, which brings several benefits:

• There will no longer be a way to have multiple simultaneous invitations. People are either in an audio/video call in the chatroom, or they aren't.
• You'll be able to see in real time who is currently in a conference call within your chatroom, before joining it.
• It will be much simpler to integrate afterward into Spaces, enabling the next feature…

Audio Rooms 🎙️

With Muji upgraded and stabilized, integrating it into Spaces will be far simpler.

Nothing has been decided yet, but an additional bookmark extension may be used to indicate to a client that a Space room is an audio room, perhaps something like this:

<item id='programming-socks@conference.megacorp.example.com'>
    <conference xmlns='urn:xmpp:bookmarks:1' name='Talk about your best programming socks deal HERE'>
        <extensions>
            <room-type xmlns='urn:xmpp:spaces:room-type:0' type="audio"/>
        </extensions>
    </conference>
</item>

It will then be possible to offer something similar to Discord's voice channels, but in XMPP!

Audio/Video Calls with SFU, The Final Frontier

Once these upcoming features are released in a new Movim version, I'll be able to tackle the final major step for audio/video integration: SFU mode. I have some general ideas in mind, but I think I'll write a detailed article about it when I get there.

This should involve integrating the Galene SFU as an XMPP service within Movim.

Furthermore, I'd like to add several features to support planning, generating calendar events (using iCal), and inviting other people into audio/video calls via URLs. This should make Movim a solid, almost-complete (it's never truly done!) standards-based web calling platform. 🎉

Let's Continue Together

Do you like what I'm doing and want to support me on this long journey?

Don't hesitate to join the Official Chatroom, deploy your own Movim instance, share the good news on Mastodon, or fund all the exciting features above.

I'll keep you posted on all the new things coming, as always!

In the meantime, I'm going back to my code. 🧑‍💻

That's all, folks!

#movim #xmpp #muji #sfu