I’ve just personally never liked them, and I suspect I’m not alone in this.

I’m with you on that, but I’ve been willing to look past it since it checks every other box I have.

Good on you for leaving that mess!

Fluxer is very promising, but unfortunately it’s a bit rough right now. Screensharing doesn’t work, the server began to slow down from the influx of discord refugees, and overall it’s all still rather buggy.

There is a major refactor that will be released at some point which will hopefully help, but until such time, you may want to give Movim a try, which has been in development much longer (since 2010). It doesn’t require an email to create an account, and runs right in the browser so it’s very quick to get into to test with a friend. The only downside is that it currently requires a chromium based browser (Chromium, Opera, or Vivaldi) to also stream an application’s audio when screen sharing.

You have personally used the monocles app from F-droid to have group video calls and shared your screen in a call?

AFAIK Monocles also hosts a Movim instance, which is separate from their mobile app (The mobile app is a fork of Conversations with some additions from Cheogram and Blabber).

Are you sure you are not confusing the two? I ask because I can’t find any mention of that ability to perform group calls on the Monocles website, nor on their Codeberg.

Conversations, which the Monocles mobile app is based on, still cannot perform group calls or group video calls as of 3 months ago, so I’d be a little surprised if Monocles independently added that ability without upstreaming it to Conversations.

I’ve been recommending Movim myself, actually. I also see it as the best option, currently.

I’m generally only recommending Movim since it being a PWA allows it to be a one-stop-shop that functions well enough across any device universally, reducing complexity for the average user (which is critically important when on-boarding).

However, there are native applications that could be used instead, such as the desktop app Dino, which is compatible with Movim’s group video calls. Unfortunately it is not yet able to screenshare.

The native Mobile apps tend to be lagging behind with group call support. Conversations/Cheogram/Monocles can all do 1-to-1 audio and video calls, but cannot screenshare or join group calls yet.

Text chat and file/image sharing is 100% compatible across all clients.

If Movim is able to attract enough Discord refugees, and thus increase funding (it currently receives $43 a month from patreon, plus small grants from foundations like NLnet), it would likely be able to create a native version of the app for desktop/mobile.

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Stoat still hasn’t enabled screensharing or video calls.

Unfortunately Mumble doesn’t allow for group video calls or screensharing. Personally I’d recommend Movim for people who require those additional features.