tldr; Movim is getting many exciting new features and is looking for your financial support to cover costs and free up development time.

2026 is shaping up to be a landmark year for Movim.

When I launched the project in 2010, I never imagined how significant it would become for so many communities, individuals, and for me personally.

What started as a small hobby project quickly turned into something that occupies nearly every week of my life: fixing bugs, adding new features, redesigning the user interface…

Here's a screenshot from the project's introductory conference in Bordeaux back in 2010. 😸

Fast forward 15 years: in 2025, the project reached 10K commits, packed with exciting new features documented on the official blog. 🥳

2026 Goals

Most of the features below were presented at my FOSDEM talk in Brussels, you can watch it here: Movim: Building a Decentralized Social Network on XMPP.

The "Bye Bye Discord 👋, Hello Movim ✨" Campaign

Following recent changes to the Discord platform, many users have been wondering whether Movim could serve as a viable alternative. A short poll published on Mastodon received over 600 responses, revealing strong interest in features that Movim is currently missing.

Everything is explained in detail in this dedicated article.

Spaces 🌌

This will likely be the biggest feature added to Movim this year; and in just one (very busy) week, the foundation is already in place! There's still plenty left to do, though. 😉

The goal is to release, within the next few weeks, a new version featuring a working initial implementation of the XMPP Space Extension, which I helped standardize last year alongside my friend nicoco.

Here's a first look at the development version. 👀

A Space will let you create a dedicated environment where you can invite friends or colleagues to chat, organize a list of rooms, and manage roles, invitations, and calls. All in one place.

Spaces will initially be private and invite-only, with public Spaces potentially offered once everything is stable.

I'll share more details in upcoming blog posts.

Audio Rooms 🎙️

Once the first iteration of Spaces is live, audio rooms will be the first feature built into them. This will allow users to drop into a room listed within one of their Spaces and talk with everyone else present.

This was also one of the most-requested Discord features, and I can't wait to start building it.

Initially, audio rooms will be fully peer-to-peer. Audio scales well this way, meaning your stream is sent directly to the other participants. I'm also still working on SFU support for Movim, funded by NLNet, which will allow audio rooms to scale massively in the future. 🚀

Video Calls and SFU Support 📹

Significant improvements and fixes to video calls in Movim were made recently. Movim can now share your desktop or application audio when screen sharing is enabled.

This is perfect for streaming a gaming session with friends or maybe even watching a movie together. 😍

Here too, SFU support will be a game-changer, enabling audio and video calls with dozens of participants.

(Major) Memory Optimization

As outlined in a previous blog post, significant work is underway to allow Movim to share memory between connected users, dramatically reducing total memory consumption by around 80% initially.

Once deployed, this should allow me to comfortably handle at least 1000 concurrent Movim sessions on mov.im (the movim.eu XMPP server behind it can handle considerably more).

These changes are nearly complete, and I'm hoping to merge them into the main branch within the coming weeks.

Help Movim Reach Its Goals!

All of these features will keep me busy for many months. The main thing holding me back from focusing even more on the project is time. I'd also like to start covering some of the expenses I've been personally absorbing for years to keep the project running.

That's why I'm launching the "Fund Movim 2026" campaign. 😊 A progress bar has been added to the homepage to track the current status, and I'll share updates throughout the year.

In the spirit of full transparency, here's a breakdown of the goals.

Operational Costs: ~€1,000/year

I've been covering most of the project's costs out of my pocket since the beginning. After checking up my accounts, I found I spend an average of €1,000 per year on it.

• Roughly €180/year in domain names (yes, I own several to prevent cyber-squatting).

• €35/month (€420/year) for the server in Germany that hosts mov.im, the movim.eu and jappix.com XMPP servers, and all account data stored on them (files, blog posts, messages).

• €400 in design help from my friend Rimou in 2025–2026. He's responsible for all the mascots, stickers, and illustrations you've seen around the project over the past few months.

Travel Costs: ~€750/year

Each year I try to attend the XMPP Summit in Brussels (just before FOSDEM) to discuss and help standardize XMPP, as well as at least one XMPP hackathon with other developers.

I genuinely enjoy these events, they help ensure that Movim remains fully standards-compliant and compatible with other clients and servers in the XMPP ecosystem as well as discussing and briging new exciting ideas in the community.

I travel exclusively by train and bicycle. Movim is a low-carbon project. 🌍🫶

• A 4-day trip to Brussels (XMPP Summit + FOSDEM) costs around €500 (€200 for the train, €300 for accommodation).

• A 2-day hackathon costs around €250 (mostly train fares), this year's hackathon will actually be hosted at my place! 😉

Funding More Free Time

Honestly, I'd already be thrilled if the community could just cover my basic costs.

Back in 2018, I chose to reduce my day job to four days a week in order to free up one day per week for Movim. But as you may have noticed, I tend to contribute a little more often than that. 🤭

I did some math: that one day per week devoted to Movim would be worth around €650/month if I were working full-time. So I'm adding two new funding goals: one to cover half a day per week, and one to cover the full day I currently dedicate to the project.

It's an experiment… let's see how it goes. 😄

Here's a preview of the donation progress bar on the movim.eu homepage. 🌡️ 🪙

How Can You Help?

As you may have noticed, I'm not offering any perks or rewards in return (except the opportunity for your company to be listed as a sponsor on the Movim page). No badges, no lifetime subscriptions, no premium access. I might send stickers to interested supporters once they're available, though. 👀

I'm also not interested in hosting thousands of accounts; I'd rather see the network continue its organic, federated growth. (Speaking of which, if you're an instance admin, please don't forget to add your server to join.movim.eu. We've found that many aren't doing this. 😶)

My goal is simply to keep having fun while building a free, fully decentralized social platform for everyone and to keep delivering exciting new features through a clean, intuitive interface.

If you'd like to help Movim grow and reach its 2026 goals, here's how:

• Become a Movim Patron: two tiers available: one at €3/month (the price of a Discord Nitro subscription… quite the coincidence 🤭) and one at €30/month, which gets your name or company listed as a Movim sponsor on the movim.eu homepage.

• If you prefer a one-time donation, I also have a PayPal. It's a bit harder to track contributions there, so Patreon is preferred if possible. 😉

If you have other ideas or would like to contribute in a different way, you know where to find me.

As always, and especially this time, please share this article and spread the word with your friends!

In the meantime, back to work. There's a lot to do. 💪

That's all, folks. ✨

#movim #xmpp #funding #donation #discord

Before announcing some new exciting features for the users lets talk about the big incoming change for the admins in #Movim 🧑‍💻✨

Movim used to have a "one user = one php worker" policy. The sourcecode was fully refactored to isolate user sessions in those workers allowing worker to host several users!

This is the biggest architectural change in Movim since its full real-time rewrite of 2014 🤯

The goal of this change is simple: by having several users / worker most of the "Movim code" is shared, lowering the memory usage.

We are testing a 4 users/worker policy. Which saves 75% of RAM, pretty neat no?

There is still some quirks to fix, but it's coming soon 👀

#xmpp #memory #optimization

Discord is rolling out an age-verification system on its platform and preparing for its IPO in March 2026.

Beginning with a phased global rollout to new and existing users in early March, [Discord] users may be required to engage in an age-verification process to change certain settings or access sensitive content. This includes age-restricted channels, servers, or commands and select message requests.

Today we are launching our very first campaign to help you to migrate from Discord to Movim.

To start with we did a little poll to ask you what you would like us to add to the platform to make you feel like home when joining in from Discord... and we were actually very surprised by the amount of answers we got!

So let's do it! 💪

Some exciting features were already added the past few days and more exciting ones will come in the upcoming weeks 👀!

We would like to have all the support we can to help us in the process so spread the good news around, follow us on Mastodon, subscribe, deploy a new Movim instance and invite your friends.

If you can we would be really pleased if you joined as a Supporter on Patreon... for the price of a monthly Discord Nitro subscription, 3€/month 😸.

This little extra money will help us free more time to focus on all those new exciting features and really build the best comfy nook for you, your friends, family or colleagues.

Stay tuned, a lot of exciting stuff are coming soon 😁

That's all folks!

#xmpp #discord #movim #campaign #patreon

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. ❤️

Blogs are one of the historical features of Movim, the upcoming 0.32 release will redefine how you interact with them and how you can follow them.

In this short article you'll discover how they are handled in #Movim by also learning the particularities of the #XMPP Network compared to the #Fediverse one.

XMPP and ActivityPub: Two Different Approaches

Movim is only relying on the XMPP #protocol to store and exchange the information it manages. When you authenticate with your account (for example, john@movim.eu), Movim will directly connect to your XMPP server (movim.eu in our example) and will then provide a complete social and chat experience on top of it. Everything you will do will be stored on it: chat messages, uploaded files, profile pictures, publications and many other things.

It is then the role of your XMPP server to contact the other servers to spread and receive the information to your contacts and followers.

This architecture is completely different than on the Fediverse (the federated network that is built on the #ActivityPub protocol). In the Fediverse each platform has a specific role (microblogging, picture sharing, publishing and watching videos), and you have to create an account on each of them to use their respective features.

Work is then done by the developers between each of those platforms (Peertube ActivityPub documentation, Mastodon ActivityPub documentation...) to try to standardize their interactions with the others on top of some generic protocols.

In XMPP clients and servers developers are standardizing together the concepts and interactions they want to manage in extensions (called XEPs) before or during their integrations and those concepts are made generic enough to be directly handled easily by the other projects.

For example, there is an #XEP to manage your chat messages history, XEP-0313: Message Archive Management, there is another XEP that explains how you can bookmark and synchronize chatrooms XEP-0402: PEP Native Bookmarks, another one that defines how you can publish Stories XEP-0501: Pubsub Stories, there is one that shows how clients handles emoji reactions bellow chat messages XEP-0444: Message Reactions...

We have today more than 500 XEPs that standardize most of the core features of all the social interactions we can have online. And we are working actively on what is missing. 😉

You can see the complete list on the XMPP Software Foundation website. One useful feature is that by clicking on the buttons on the right column you can see which clients and servers are actually implementing them! It's super useful when you want to integrate one in your own project and you want to test the integration with the others. 🤩

So! It means that the Prosody, Tigase, MongooseIM, OpenFire, ejabberd XMPP servers (yes there are many of them already) that host the millions of accounts, including yours (movim.eu is using ejabberd) can already allow you to do microblogging, publish long articles, photos, messages, do video-conferencing... out of the box. How convenient! ✨

It is then the role of the clients that connect to it to offer a "view" on those features. And Movim is one of those clients. To say it differently, Movim (like all the other XMPP clients) stores no important information; it just caches and displays what it found on the network.

Blogs, a simple news feed on your XMPP account

In Movim blogs are not different from all the features above. They were historically defined in 2008 in an XEP called XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP that evolved in 2022 into XEP-0472: Pubsub Social Feed.

This new XEP clarifies and generalizes some concepts of XEP-0277 but the core idea stays the same:

• An XMPP account or an XMPP service (a subpart of an XMPP server) can host nodes.
• Accounts can follow those nodes.
• Accounts can publish items on those nodes.
• Items that are published on those nodes are articles that can have different forms but are all valid Atom 1.0 elements (yes the same thing you can find in the RSS/Atom feeds online, we are not reinventing things, just reusing widely available technologies 😜.)

So what is a blog then?

A blog is a node, hosted on your own account, managed by you, where you can publish short articles (called "Briefs" in Movim) or very long ones (like this one ☺️) in the form of Atom 1.0 elements that people can follow!

When you publish a new article on your blog Movim will then simply send it to your XMPP server and store it in your own personal blog node linked to your account. Your friends that follow it will then receive a notification that a new article was published. And... that's it!

So how can I publish an article on my blog?

Some of the Movim users are sometimes asking, "But where is the API to publish blog posts?" Our API is the XMPP standard 😸! By just reading the XEP and using one of the many clients or libraries (that are available in all the main programming languages), you will be able to publish articles in a few lines without even knowing how Movim does it.

But you actually want to see how it's done on the wire, isn't it?

Let's take a small example with john@movim.eu publishing an article on her blog. 😛

<iq id='pub1'
    to='john@movim.eu'
    type='set'>
  <pubsub xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub'>
    <publish node='urn:xmpp:microblog:0'>
      <item id='1cb57d9c-1c46-11dd-838c-001143d5d5db'>
        <entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
          <title type='text'>Trying out Movim ✨</title>
          <id>1cb57d9c-1c46-11dd-838c-001143d5d5db</id>
          <published>2025-05-08T18:30:02Z</published>
          <updated>2025-05-08T18:30:02Z</updated>
        </entry>
      </item>
    </publish>
  </pubsub>
</iq>

This is what Movim is actually sending when John publishes an article on her blog. An XMPP library will also be able to do it; if you're motivated, you can also write it by hand (but you don't need to; that's why you have libraries and clients for that! 💪).

More in detail, we can see the actual article in the <entry/> element; it contains a title, an identifier and some dates of publication and update. The example is super simplified but know that you can put way more information (like attached files, tags...). And as you can see it is an actual standard Atom 1.0 element so you can easily take articles from your WordPress blog or any other website that can generate an Atom or RSS feed and publish them on your XMPP blog, natively!

We actually publish this entry in a specific item having a unique ID on the node urn:xmpp:microblog:0(that is the standard identifier for all the blogs on the XMPP network) and we send it directly to the john@movim.eu account.

If John wants to update her article, he just has to publish it again on the same item. If he wants to publish a new one, he publishes another <entry/> in a new item having a new identifier on the same node, super simple!

And how can I subscribe to a blog and be notified?

Movim used to have an implicit subscription system; this means that when John and Yoko were added mutually as contacts they were automatically receiving each other's blog notifications. This wasn't really understood by our users and was quite hard to understand; it also had some limitations.

In Movim 0.32 the subscription will be explicit, with a simple Follow button. This means that you no longer need to be friends mutually to follow each other, and that you can just follow anyone (that has a public blog, you can also restrict your blog to your contacts only if you want) on the network.

Now let's imagine that Yoko wants to follow John's blog. Using her own XMPP client she simply has to send a subscribe message to the node where John is publishing his articles.

<iq type='set'
    from='yoko@jabber.fr/movim'
    to='john@movim.eu'
    id='sub1'>
  <pubsub xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub'>
    <subscribe node='urn:xmpp:microblog:0'/>
  </pubsub>
</iq>

And that's it 😎! See how simple XMPP is?

In the future when John publishes a new article his own XMPP server will check all the persons that are subscribed to the node and directly push a message with the fresh article in it (there are some optimizations involved there to reduce the load, but let's keep things simple ☺️). Here Movim is just an interface to write the article and publish it; the XMPP server is actually taking care of handling the article and delivering it to everyone, and they can do it massively with very little resource.

What's next?

Movim 0.32 is bringing a totally new approach to how you blog on the XMPP network. In the upcoming months we are planning to integrate more features around that new Follow button, like being able to list your subscribers, get some general statistics on the amount of followers that an account has, or get notified instantly when someone subscribes to your blog.

We found that some of the XMPP servers we're using were missing some of the standardized features at the moment, some tickets were opened (see ejabberd#4484, prosody#1972, ejabberd#4483, ejabberd#4481 and prosody#1973 and once those features are integrated, Movim will follow up. 😌

In the XMPP community we think that taking time to discuss and work together to standardize all the concepts we want to integrate in the protocol is the best way to make it the best, most modular, reliable and scalable protocol out there to handle all our social interactions online. Don't hesitate to join us (and invite your friends 😸) if you have questions or you want to develop crazy ideas on the protocol.

That's all, folks! 🎉

#movim #xmpp #embed #peertube #decentralization #videos