sydent VS Mumble

GitHub Discussions can also be a great place for support as long as these are regularly monitored. Another option along the same lines is Discourse and the Open Source Matrix which is used by quite a few Open Source and community-based projects.

Tangential: the article notes that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app”. While this is technically true, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not end-to-end encrypted, so it's less secure in that regard than, say, Signal or even WhatsApp. Telegram does have opt-in end-to-end encrypted one-on-one chats, but those are very inconvenient to use.

For a properly encrypted chat app, including group chats (opt-in), try Matrix instead: https://matrix.org/

I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance.

[0] https://matrix.org

Trillian mod here. There's this new thing called Beeper, works on matrix.org. It's not as the good old times, but I'm currently using whatsapp, FB messenger, discord, telegram, signal, imessage and a few more. It's not Cerulean experience, but it's... slowly improving.

I'm trying to change my account provider from "matrix.org" to whatever Element One needs, and for the life of me I just don't understand what values I have to put where to be able to log in. I tried `element.io`, which takes me to sso.element.io but this doesn't seem like the right thing (no credentials work as I expect.

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.