I have been asking sorund in all platforms if anyone knows of a project to build a client with UI/UX format similar to Discord/Element/Slack but based on XMPP?

I was previously pointed to XEP-0503 which outlines the "Spaces" concept for XMPP which would enable the basic backend service to work with "Spaces" and "subchannels", but all I have found so far is Cheogram implementing it in channel info to view the set of channels hosted by a given instance/domain. It works, though not extremely reliably.

Does anyone know of a project explicitly pursing an XMPP competitor to Discord/Element?

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[–] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

There isn't one.

I recently spent a few weeks looking for exaclty that and I had no look.

I've looked into XMPP, Matrix and other FOSS self hosted options. There isn't anything out there offering the exact features as discord.

Disclaimer: I don't use discord and never will. But I do game frequently with a few close friends. I have bothered them so much asking them to try a few options.

Basically their requirements were:

support for desktop (linux and windows)
support for mobile (android)
voice channels where you can see who's online before joining
means to bundle several "channels" in a group (discord spaces)

My friends complained a lot about XMPP android apps, they mentioned the options available felt unfinished and looked ugly. I understand that's just an opinion but that is important for some people. Edit: spelling

The closest thing we've found is matrix, which is what we are using. But there really is only one client that works on the desktop/webapp, which is element. For android the only one available is schildichat next (spelling probably wrong). Matrix is also very tricky because not all server implementations support audio/video. The ability of seeing who's online before joining isn't available yet.

Matrix still lacks in many other things discord has to offer. I haven't been able to get stickers working, for instance. Not a dealbreaker for my friends but others may think differently.

I am not advocating for Matrix. It is very cumbersome because it depends on having the exact server and client that works. But it is what we are using.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've been digging into thos heavily regarding XMPP. Good news is there is some backend development going on that will enable this, bad news is its going to take a bit of time and then the clients will have to adopt or be developed. Maybe I will try out vibecoding it, lol.

[–] miau@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's nice to hear! I would love to see XMPP get the love it deserves.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 3 points 1 month ago

XOWS has the front end aesthetic down

https://github.com/iquercorb/xows?tab=readme-ov-file

and so does prose.org

neither have actual subchannel/spaces functions across multiple domains though. Hopefully easy enough to patch in with new spaces protocol when it becomes available?

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I personally think Movim is the best option for now. It doesn't aim to be a direct Discord clone, but it has a lot of the features Discord users would expect, except for the "spaces" (guilds) feature. But you can have A/V calls in groups with screen-sharing and so on, so functionality wise it isn't that far off. They are also currently thinking about turning the current community blogs into something more like Discord forums, but that is still in the planning phase.

[–] leetnewb@beehaw.org 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

https://prose.org/

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago

This is more of a Slack clone. Promising project, but the "enterprise" focus is a bit off-putting. In addition compatibility with other XMPP clients isn't great due to some design decisions they made.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago

This is slick! Looks pretty polished. I'm interested to figure out how they enable channel creation and management. I'm assuming this is just listing all the channels on the server and the instance doesn't federate?

I'm also always curious when there is an open source product like this that has a free self hosted version that they say is user capped at 20 users. How? Is that just an arbitrarily string of code inserted someone that can be easily stripped out? I see some forks so could be.

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago

pardon the typos

[–] SloppilyFloss@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

https://github.com/iquercorb/xows

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is kinda under heavy development still. I tried it out and it does work, but they chose an odd way of querying group chats which makes it impractical to use with regular XMPP servers and other clients (basically it doesn't have channel bookmarks).

It does look promising overall, but I think it will only make sense for small, private servers due to the above design decisions.

[–] SloppilyFloss@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah I don't think there's any one client that necessarily hits all the boxes. As long as you stick to Movim, Dino, Gajim, and Conversations you should pretty much be set for most things.

Maybe the only solution is to roll your own client 😉

[–] Coopr8@kbin.earth 2 points 1 month ago

Looks great! Do you know of any public instances running out there I could check out?

[–] QuadDamage@kbin.earth 1 points 2 weeks ago

Closest thing would be movim (mov.im), but note that Discord itself is several things wrapped into a frontend.