This might be one of the biggest #release ever made on the project, and it includes numerous fixes and new features in the 3 major topics Movim offers: instant messaging, social networking, and video conferencing.

Let's cut the blabla and dive directly into the exciting things you can find in this release. 😸

Blog and Communities

Follow everyone!

As explained with plenty of details in our previous article, The difference between XMPP and ActivityPub, explained through the Blog feature, we completely changed the way you can follow someone on the XMPP network to get notified about their blog publications.

Until now, blog subscriptions were "implicit" in the sense that you needed to send an invitation and have the contact in your contact list to allow the blog subscription to be effective.

In the new flow you now have two buttons, one to add a contact in your contacts list and one to follow its publications, and they are fully independent. 👌

The new "Follow the Contact" feature is then close to what you could find for many years with the "Follow the Community" one.

A couple of tickets were opened on the ejabberd and Prosody bug trackers to complete their XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe implementation (the XMPP extension that defines the bases of all the social features on XMPP; see the article linked above for all the details). Once those features are implemented server-side, Movim will be able to notify you about a new follower and give you follower statistics on all the blogs (including yours in real-time).

Improved post publications

Movim now allows #PeerTube videos to be embedded in your articles; to do so, just attach a PeerTube link to your article, and Movim will take care of embedding the video directly in your publication.

When publishing a post, #Movim allows you to write your article in Markdown to format it. Movim now supports GitHub Flavored Markdown that allows you to format your articles, like including tables, advanced links, and images customizations, and even more!

Know Your Privacy Settings

Movim allows you to configure in detail how you want to share your content with the world, with two important settings:

• Make your profile public or private on the Movim instance you're on, with the possibility to define a local nickname. This will allow other users of the instance to find you in the Global Search feature.

• Make your blog public or private to only restrict its content to your contacts... or open it to everyone.

In this release some information cards were added to ensure that the user is aware of the current configuration while browsing their own profile.

Share, like, and comment on articles more easily.

You can now pick several friends or chatrooms you're in when sharing an article.

Articles are now better embedded in the chats, and the likes and comments flows and layout have been completely redesigned to be more practical, especially on mobile.

The articles' footers were redesigned to improve and simplify all the interactions you can have with them.

Chats and Chatrooms

Message history navigation and search

Browsing and searching in your chat conversation history is now simpler than ever!

Many message history issues were fixed. In this release, Movim is keeping track of the earliest message received in your discussions and then knows exactly when it needs to request your #XMPP server for more messages (or not) when scrolling up.

If you use PostgreSQL, each message is now indexed and can be searched instantaneously using keywords in our new Search History feature.

On the screenshot below, the user is browsing old messages and can go "back to the future" easily with the bottom right button.

You can also see the new "chat navigation bar" that is listing the currently connected users in chatrooms; this sets the base for many upcoming exciting features around chat administration and user exploration and discovery 😉.

End-to-End Encryption and Bridges Integration

On a more technical note, the OMEMO-related code was completely redesigned and simplified. This fixes numerous issues we had with key synchronization and message decryption. There are still some improvements to do, especially on the encryption library itself (but it looks like Converse.js is working on it) but this is already a huge step in the right direction. 😎

During the summer a lot of work was also done with the Slidge developers to improve the bridges' integration in Movim, including many fixes around stickers and GIF integration, chatroom management, and account linking administration.

Video-conferencing

A lot of optimizations were done in the video-conference stream management. Movim is now adapting and compressing more of your video streams if it detects that the network is degrading during the call. The resolution and frame rate are also reduced on some low-end devices to allow them to handle the calls properly.

Movim now also proposes H.264 streams first when negotiating with your contacts. Lots of devices, including mobiles, can encode and decode video with dedicated hardware, drastically reducing power consumption and overheating while doing so. Naturally it falls back to other formats (VP9, VP8) if it's not possible to have H.264.

This also improves the general video quality during a call for a generally lower bitrate.

Some tests are planned to push the next generation video format, AV1, that will push those boundaries even further 😋.

Internal changes and general changes

The core internal code was also heavily refactored and simplified the past few months. A lot of hacks and workarounds were removed with the redesign of the interaction of the Movim user-interface part and the XMPP handling part. This also improves some performances during navigation and when interacting with your content.

The Movim architecture was also redesigned to simplify the container integration. You can now build and deploy a Podman container on your machine for testing purposes in one unique console command; check out the related documentation.

In this release, Movim dropped the php-curl dependency by relying on reactphp/http, which was already offering similar features.

When uploading a file or picture, Movim gives you detailed feedback on every step of the upload, compressing the picture, sending the file to Movim, and Movim sending the file to your XMPP server.

And to finish, lots of details in the layout and interface were improved and redesigned to fit with the Material Design 3 design system, this allows Movim to integrate even better with Android devices.

What's next?

Movim 0.32 set the bases of lots of very exciting things for 2026.

We are planning to work on many exciting things including chat discussion threads, persistent video conference calls, chatroom roles, Spaces, scaling up video conference calls, and many other things ✨.

Releases after releases Movim is becoming a coherent, simple, and feature-complete platform for all your social interactions while being federated and 100% built on standards.

We really need your help to free up more time to work on it and integrate all the upcoming more exciting features, as well as cover our existing expenses (servers, travelling to technical meetups, goodies...). You can support us in many way by joining our Patreon, doing a single donation or becoming a, official sponsor of the project.

Of course, you can also share the good news around, join Movim and invite all your friends on it 😸!

That's all, folks. ❤️