For myself I just spool up a galene instance when I want to video chat someone, (honestly almost never, so not really a great recommendation ). but it is pretty easy to get running on my obsd vps.
The theory is that instead of sitting on some third party centralized video chat service, I can sit on my own, and if anybody wants to talk they can "call" me by joining in. I theory I would "call" them by joining their instance, but... yeah, you can stop laughing now. but yeah, it does turn out that I am only one in my small circle of friends and family who likes running a server.
> One more thing: I am well aware that Skype was also used to make calls to landlines and mobile phones across borders, but this is a feature that is hard to replicate, and somewhat of an add-on. If you need that kind of feature, you will have to rely on other apps on phone or websites that propose such services. Consider this out of scope for the present discussion.
Not sure about other people, but this was the only feature that I used Skype for (i.e. cheap calls to home country landlines while residing abroad).
Does anyone have a trustworthy recommendation that's similar to what Skype offered?
There are a number of providers that offer such a service with the SIP protocol. The upside is that you're not tied to a single provider; the downside is that most providers only offer unencrypted calls (using RTP, not SRTP).
Now that Android no longer includes a built-in SIP client, you must use a third-party application. I've had success with Linphone (ignore their somewhat obnoxious on-boarding procedure), I've also tried Baresip, but I've had it hang on occasion. Both are in F-Droid.
Thanks for the recommendations! I was unaware of the underlying tech, so definitely felt out of my depth... It doesn't help that most "alternative to" articles focus on (what I would consider) secondary functionality.
There are better alternatives that do not use electron because each time you use a program based on electron it tells Google what you are doing, it connects to Google.
It's like vscode based on electron but that also connects to all Microsoft related crap.
Matrix is a protocol, and it supports screensharing both on legacy VoIP and newstyle MatrixRTC group e2ee calling. Most Matrix clients (eg Element) support screensharing - one exception is Element X on mobile, which can view but not share.
https://galene.org/
The theory is that instead of sitting on some third party centralized video chat service, I can sit on my own, and if anybody wants to talk they can "call" me by joining in. I theory I would "call" them by joining their instance, but... yeah, you can stop laughing now. but yeah, it does turn out that I am only one in my small circle of friends and family who likes running a server.