I’m personally crossing my fingers for Discord.
Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.
Maybe it’s just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.
If you really only want group calls for a handful of people I can only recommend Signal for that. Just create a group chat in there. You can start a call and select it to not ring on the other peoples end and then you can just hop in and out just like a discord vc. It has a desktop app for Mac/Linux/Windows too so you could use it while gaming too. The app is not pretty but it’s minimalistic and it works. Everything is end to end enrypted even the calls and video calls.
You could even screenshare with it but i never tested how well that works. It’s free and open source. It is not federated however. But still the most easy to use and best secure and private messenger out there.
Wait a little until https://github.com/vector-im/element-call / https://call.element.io/ is done. It’s not polished yet so I can’t really recommend it but once it is properly intergrated in Matrix this will be my go-to solution.
I want lightweight-as-possible app that just does voice chat for games AND facecam chat for games, now that so many people have those. With little overlay boxes for your friends, similar to what streamers do. Partly because this would also enable deaf people to play with sign language chat.
