Direct link to the funding campaign to help accelerate the development of Discord-like features, such as servers with rooms/spaces, as well as drop-in voice channels.
It's quite an impressive little app capable of:
- Excellent text chats with file upload support, including solid optional encryption (OMEMO, based on Signal's encryption but modified to be compatible with federation)
- Group voice/video calls with screensharing (just implemented, must use a chromium based browser to screenshare an app's audio at the moment)
- A neat integrated blogging feature for communities & individuals
- a fun built-in paint program to easily annotate documents or draw stuff into the chat
- Full working and proven federation thanks to the XMPP back-end, which allows it to scale up reliably and easily self-host (XMPP is very lightweight).
- Uses the AGPL license, ensuring that corpos won't be able to take it over. It'll be community-owned forever.
In message-mode, it looks fairly similar to Discord:
The dev also posted a preview of what the new spaces feature looks like in the development branch:
Unlike Signal, Movim doesn't require a phone number email to create an account. And since it runs right in the browser, it's extremely quick to sign up and give it a test to see if it can meet your needs.
And if a Discord-alternative built on a truly open and federated protocol is something you want, consider throwing the dev a donation, or contributing with code (if you have the skills and time) or helping improve the documentation! :D
To stay updated on its progress, the !xmpp@slrpnk.net community pretty reliably posts news about it.