Moving to Movim

The Movim Chats view

Since I started this little project, one of the main things I’ve been looking for is a decent web interface for chatting. I’ve tested and rejected a lot of things. Some options came really close to being what I wanted but just didn’t seem to have any momentum behind them and stagnated.

I wanted to achieve two things when I set up ChinWag. I wanted to publish a basic guide on how to get your own public XMPP server off the ground, and I wanted to provide a good end-user experience for non-technical users to have access to that service.

It’s been a year, and aside from a lot of thinking in the shower, and chatting in various conferences when the subject comes up, I haven’t really touched the second part. That’s going to be my big push for the next year of ChinWag, and I’m starting with implementing Movim as the primary web chat client, and using it for account registration.

It has flaws right now, especially that it’s occasionally a bit flaky when trying to log in – I have been starting to flex some old programming muscles that haven’t been used for years to fix and diagnose some of this. I think it’s a great foundation for a solid user experience though, and I’ll be starting to look critically at how things go for new users especially.

I’d be really happy if any and all ChinWag users would try Movim out and give me their impressions. I know it can be a little frustrating right now, and occasionally logs you out more often than you’d want, but I think it’s going to be great for us all, especially if we end up with good OMEMO support in it.

My priorities for the immediate future of ChinWag are a stable and reliable login process for the Movim client, an easy mechanism to invite your friends to sign up or add you to their roster, and a nicer signup process that includes prompting for an email address for password reset or recovery.

While I do intend to run ChinWag as a complete communication solution for users and their contacts, please know that I will never implement anything that breaks federation with the larger XMPP community here. Provision of a fancy web client will never obstruct your ability to use the client software of your choice. For Android users, I cannot recommend Conversations to you highly enough. Do yourself a favour and pick it up if you haven’t already.

Enough from me. If you want to talk about stuff like this, please message mike@chinwag.im or stop by the Lobby channel on rooms.chinwag.im and hassle me, I’m always there!