Element does support video calls. I had one with my friend a few months ago

I just googled "open source teams alternatives" and Mattermost seems to be much better.

It's hard to get people to move from what they know and use to something else. If you moved them to Google, they'd say it's shit. Same for Zoom. They all do some stuff better than others.

Element is perfectly servicable. They're using Element Pro which is billing itself as built for government. The first problem is they called it pro, which sets expectations higher than they should be. It's not going to make them go WOW this is so much better at first glance.

Trying to onboard a gigantic number of people is going to be difficult for a system that doesn't already have a gigantic number of people on it. I can only imagine how rough the system is at the moment, but it'll work out.

what security dialogs? and what race conditions? do you know what that means, or are you just throwing around words?

if you mean the "verify your new device" dialog, yeah, it has a problem. it won't appear most of the time on clients that were not open when you sent the verification request from the new device. I don't know why, and this is not comfortable, but then I can start verification from a device I already have, and it will work. or I can also just fill in the password from my password manager, which you surely have too.

but I haven't seen other problems with it recently.

XMPP at least functions reliably, if you ignore all of the protocol extensions and use it like IRC with images of course.

which does not even have a bolted on security that way.

Though the main and only good Android client got archived.

calling element classic good is a bit of a stretch. it was very slow.

Yeah I gave up on Element/Matrix too, for other reasons.

First of all the clients don't work for shit and every update breaks something IME, got tired of that. Also for all of my normie friends and family it was "too hard" to use, I disagree, but regardless what good is a chat app if I have nobody to use it with? Further, the one friend I did convince to join also joined the public Ras Pi room, and some dickhead posted CP in it, he saw, and then I had to explain "no, this isn't a 'pedo app,' that is spam and they get banned," and I'm gonna be real I don't want to have to do that again and I can't in good faith recommend my mother use a goddamn app that very possibly could spam her with CP.

So, I moved to Delta Chat. Fixes all those problems, no complaints. Easy to use, easy onboarding, no discoverability, just chats.

Tox did their own insecure crypto and got roasted by the Wireguard dev, now they are apparently rewriting it.

I agree that Matrix is complex but personally never had issues with key verification. Just try to restart it, maybe on the other device?

Yeah but XMPP sounds so techy you know... /s

I bet that if someone scraped together the bare minimum and found a catchy name it'd be the winner easily.

Et-tu-Brutus would slay IMO.

It runs locally on my laptop, no upload anywhere, no recording either. I would be fired in an instant otherwise.

EDIT: It's a forked version of this project, in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/pasrom/meeting-transcriber