Movim for chat and video conferencing

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:10:05 -0700 from Streams

Has anyone managed to install and use Movim?

Movim – Responsive web-based cross-platform XMPP client

Movim is a kickass distributed social platform, with web client and mobile apps, that protects your privacy, comes with a set of awesome features and uses the industry-standard XMPP protocol

Hans

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 22:23:07 -0700 from hubzilla

I used it about a year ago with my main xmmp account, was not very impressed to be honest

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 07:42:49 -0700 from Streams

@Hans were you not impressed with performance, or something else?

Hans

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:33:11 -0700 from hubzilla

No, performance was ok but it is/was nothing more then any other good xmmp client is able to do.

Hans

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:33:43 -0700 from hubzilla

Imho it is easier to use encryption with a desktop client too.

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:43:00 -0700 from Streams

Did it have the ability to do video-conferencing? (with more than two people?)

I have read conflicting statements about that and cannot find any reviews that break down capabilities

Hans

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:57:35 -0700 from hubzilla

I never used video with it, I did hear someone stating Jami seems to be better these days. Was that you @Tanja ?

Tanja

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:26:02 -0700 from hubzilla

@Hans Yes, it was, but I still haven't tested it. For conference calls, it's capabilities are probably limited. From their FAQ:

1.    Start a video or audio call with a contact.
2.   Click on the "Add participant" button.
3.    Select the participant to be added to the conference.
4.    Your device is now hosting the conference.

The last part is probably the bottleneck.

Papa Dragon

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:26:06 -0700 from CaseLibre

I tried Movim recently on https://mov.im/ using my XMPP account, it worked fine for text chat and also audio/video chat with someone using Conversations client on Android. "Someone" being my wife who has an XMPP account on our family ejabberd server.

I did not have the opportunity to try videoconferencing with more than two users, but I could probably give it a try in the next few days and let you know.

Hans

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:33:53 -0700 from hubzilla

Might be good to know what you expect @Adam Robertson. How many people do you want to have in a chat? On Friday or tomorrow evening ( German time ) I might be able to help test too

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 10:57:54 -0700 from Streams

@Papa Dragon  Yes, I would be interested and grateful for any feedback about Movim using Video chat.

@Hans  I am doing some it work for a small private school. The admin staff frequently use Zoom,  but have been running into issues with limits on time, amongst other things.  They probably have 5 ~ 15 people at a time on these meetings.
They asked me to explore some other options.  At the same time, they also asked me to explore chat/sms applications

So far, it looks like xmpp would answer nicely. I am looking at Movim, or possibly Jitsi for video conferencing

There is also some SIP clients that do video chat.  In fact, it looks like Jami uses SIP, but like @Tanja  mentioned, there is probably a bottleneck

Sophie Hassfurther

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:15:25 -0700 from hubzilla

@Adam Robertson

some other options

Have you looked at Big Blue Button? Works quite nicely for our house project. Caveat emptor: we don't host it ourselves.

Tanja

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:24:28 -0700 from hubzilla

I was going to suggest Nextcloud Talk, precisely because NC has other things to offer that would be useful for schools, including BBB integration. I did hear, though, that self-hosting BBB was somewhat of a hassle, but I never had cause to try.

Another alternative would be Matrix, of course. Here it depends on the available server resources, how many users you can have for a conference call.

My experience with self-hosting Jitsi is not so great. It turned out to be a total resource hog, in both native install and the docker version, and I had trouble establishing and holding even one on one calls.

And yes, Jami started out as a SIP client.

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:24:51 -0700 from Streams

@Sophie I have not heard of it before, but am looking now.

Tanja

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:29:57 -0700 from hubzilla

One other thing, my pet peeve with XMPP in general - of all the clients I have tried, Desktop, Android, and even iOS, there's only one that can smoothly handle OMEMO encrypted images / attachments, and that's Conversations. Every other one I tried shows a download link which can't be decrypted. PGP is too complicated to set up for less technically inclined users, and for OTR, both parties need to be online. I still have a server, but mostly out of nostalgia, and it's pretty easy on resources, so it doesn't really cost me anything to keep around. But I would definitely recommend Matrix over XMPP. Synapse is also fairly simple to set up, and for calls, it's also not that hard to set up your own turn server, e.g. coturn.

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:34:23 -0700 from Streams

@Tanja do you remember the specs on the server you were using to self-host Jitsi? It looks like both BBB and Jitsi have requirements that would certainly make me have to upgrade the VPS we are currently using. I think the current VPS is Contabo 4 vCPU Cores/8 GB RAM. I would probably need to move that to a dedicated CPU VPS.

Adam Robertson

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:41:01 -0700 from Streams

The appealing thing about XMPP is that there is a service JMP.chat that allows for a phone number to be assigned to an XMPP account, and acts as a gateway between the account and phones...thus replacing Google Voice, which is one of the other things they asked me to research.

I currently have my own ejabberd server running, with that service and I basically use it as my primary contact number. I can send/receive texts from multiple devices, make calls, etc. I think I pay around $3.00/month for the phone number.

If I could set up an XMPP server for the school and give each of the Admin Staff an account with a phone-number attached, as well as provide Video Conferencing, that would check all of my boxes.

Hans

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:46:07 -0700 from hubzilla

There is one funny side to xmmp. I used it to send monitoring warnings and alerts to those who needed to be available during the night and weekends. Most of those people did have wifi at home so all they needed is a good client.

Tanja

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:52:26 -0700 from hubzilla

I had it on my main VPS, which is 8 vCore CPU / 16 GB RAM, but it has of course all my other self hosted applications; Hubzilla, Nextcloud, and matrix-synapse, among others. None of those are using too many resources, though; CPU and memory usage are usually less than 20%. Jitsi, after a while, was eating everything up. It's possible, of course, that I could have fixed it with some research into configuration, but it wasn't worth the time for me, especially since NC Talk now also allows you to invite guests via link.