I maintain quite a few packages on Nixpkgs, so I use Atom to subscribe to a release feeds for those projects so I can get a form of notification independent of the project’s code forge (mostly meaning I can spend less time on MS GitHub).

K. Have fun doing nothing & sticking to your shitty networks that give you no control or freedom—as opposed to trying literally anything to change the situation.

So you are saying we should all use Reddit, Discord, Meta WhatsApp, & Microsoft GitHub since more folks are there? The only way to buck those trends is to be the change you want to see & slowly move what groups you can away. You don’t have to get everything to buy in at once & there are mirrors / gateways that you can use as a transition. Make a clan homepage & say the VoIP is here & the chat is there… now you aren’t beholden to one specific tool going to shit or waiting 10 years for something to have literally every feature you want. If 2 applications is a barrier, maybe that someone isn’t the right fit for your group anyhow.

For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.

As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.

IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.

XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.

Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.

But you can use a chat service for chat & a VoIP service for VoIP & that can be fine. A kitchen sink isn’t always the best approach.

But if you are looking to keep tabs on something, Movim is very much focused on multi-user jingle & is something you could deploy & have decentralized users join from their own servers.

Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.

Doesn’t have a cup holder either! Why does ever alternative need to have every feature or it can’t be called an alternative? Does your VoIP app need the ability to send videos? Can you not use something else in tandem to do the more social side? Sometimes it’s better to focus on one thing & do it well—especially under-resourced like free software often is. You could argue just as easily these other features as bloat if you don’t want or use them.

AUR has a lot of packages but still nowhere near as much as Nixpkgs

Sometimes a hyphenated adjective

We can & should demand at least gateways & mirrors if not at least a single alternative. Considering they have funding, they can self-host to actually control a forum or chat room as well as a code mirror (even if just HTTP with no forge). Folks are also undervaluing how some users are banned from access to these US-based platforms under US sanctions.

So? Not everything is packaged on all distros & you can benefit from sharing & reusing declarative configuration even if for specific scopes (meaning not just NixOS).

The pro-FOSS stance would be to get your communications off of being exclusively proprietary platforms. Developer & early adopter freedom & privacy matters—but instead they are choosing Discord & Microsoft GitHub as their only platforms.

Just use Nix. It can run all the packages on whatever platform. It has the largest repository of software & are some of the most up-to-date.

Green washed. If they cared about sustainability they wouldn’t have removed the headphone jack for longer-lived headphones—and instead started selling their own branded Bluetooth earbuds like the rest of the manufacturers.