Why is a 20 year old Jabber.org account almost completely useless at Movim?

Movim kinda sucks and has very little to offer - or does it?

I recently created this account because I wanted to give Movim another chance to impress after finding it largely unimpressive. A friend of mine had published a PeerTube video going through all the totally bitchen' aspects of Movim, things I hadn't seen before. So I gave it another shot.

I've been an advocate for XMPP for a couple of decades, since it was first hoisted onto the canvas of the Internet. It had much promise, and unfortunately, was a little too geeky for a time when people weren't so aware of just how important it is to keep your privacy close to your chest.

Again, the foray into Movim was a miserable disappointment. so I went back to the video on my PeerTube server that my friend had published. I tried comparing his tutorial tour side by side with my interface and Voila! Still no joy.

The revalation - Eureka, I have found it! (or, the sad epiphany).

Then, I went into the configuration move.im/?conf and saw a notification that read:

Movim is currently working in degraded mode

Your server doesn’t support XMPP Pubsub persistence or the social features (communities, news feed and profile) are disabled by the administrator. Please contact your server administrator to see if this feature can be enabled.

Hm.... Okay then, let's create an @movim.eu jabber account and see if there's anything different.

Boom Shakalaka! Now we're totally rockin' :)

Boom Shakalaka! I have seen the light :) But that doesn't really afford me much in the way of satisfaction. I'm extremely disappointed that my coveted @jabber.org addy, which is where everyone knows to reach me, is basically unworkable in Movim. Well, let's be fair here, it's just as functional as it always was, I've got OMEMO, and I can converse with folks with encrypted messaging just as I have enjoyed in Gajim, Conversations, etc. It is a much nicer interface in my web browser and the desktop app, but it's also a lot heavier in weight and demands more resources for a simple messaging app than other methods.

It's sad, and now I have an XMPP account that works with Movim, but the personal dilemma remains - my main, longtime XMPP account is a nogo on this platform, and that makes me sad.

What to do now?

So in the short term, what's my intended solution? I think deploying a Prosody instance on a domain of mine where I can deploy a new Jabber branding for my identity is what I'm most inclined to do, and yes, I'll install Movim as well, maybe not on that domain, but I feel that I might be best served if I just self-host all the infra myself, so I'm not left with such a non-workable situation again.

I wish this was not the case. I was going to deploy and self-host Movim anyway at some point, but this just highlights the problems that have plagued XMPP over the decades, is a sad state of affairs, does nothing to alleviate these issues, and highlights the problems with simply not self-hosting one's infra in the first place.

Our current sate of affairs, and flux - the future awaits and it is bright.

In this era where federation, confederation, and decentralization, and portable identity are major emerging concerns and technologies as we leave behind the deprecated, legacy social vertical networks comprised of privacy disrespecting, proprietary closed source monolithic silos, the need to provide your own self-hosted infrastructure becomes ever more prerequisite - for each and every person.

It is no longer enough to expect someone else to provide the social networking infrastructure that brings with it the freedom we deserve, we must resolve to build our own cabins ourselves, and provide our own self-sufficiency.

Final thoughts - Please share your thoughts

In closing, I would really like to hear from you all with your thoughts and suggestions. I like Movim, and can now use it as a viable social networking platform, a news platform, a platform for publishing articles, or just little tidbit posts. What do you want to see? Where do you feel all of this fits together, and how can we bring our legacy identities into contemporary times?

I look forward to hearing back and thank you for taking the time to read :)