c-toxcore VS Mumble

See also this somewhat infamous thread on Tox's cryptographic design[1].

[1]: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

In case with Tox you have to trust in homebrew crypto that was never properly audited (how about that security issue reported by Donenfeld in 2017, which is being tackled only now, sort of?) -- and outdated and outright abandoned clients which were never above, let's say, "beta quality".

it has the new group chat feature (https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/pull/2269)

"If Tox already does onion routing, why use Tox over Tor?"

What an arbitrary criteria to judge a project by. There have been 5 releases in the past year, including a major feature release.

https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/releases

Signal isn't falling behind and Tox is an old service that has had issues with messages being spoofable since day 1

tox https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

You could use a Tox front end like qTox or Toxic. It is a fully encrypted end-to-end communication protocol that allows text, voice, and video chat. The github page for the Tox protocol has some useful caveats about the its security.

It links to a bug report discussion where one of the developers states that they don't understand the security properties of tox very well[1].

I find that worrying.

[1] https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.