We were using this for a while to do meetings for sr.ht, but we recently switched to - believe it or not - Mumble. It's old and unsexy but damn it's reliable.
Mumble is great, we use it lots for working on Secure Scuttlebutt, but we end up using Jitsi for calls between small groups with fast internet because video chat is nice with friends.
I would love to use something like Mumble but with video, although that may just be Jitsi.
Mumble is insanely awesome. It's still my goto app if you don't need video (which is most of the time for me). The only downside (maybe really an upside) is that you need to spend considerable amounts of time and effort setting it up for good audio quality. But the latency just can't be beat.
Audio quality depends on jitter timing. Too low and you get dropouts, too high and you get uncanny valley with the delays and pauses. You should never have to twiddle these settings since internet routing is so dynamic. But things to look at include jitter sample size (20ms is a good start), codec selection (lower bandwidth), and server resource usage (more cpu or ram). I don’t use mumble but ran an asterix server for a decade and these where the three things that mattered most to reduce conference call latency
In this case, it's mostly getting the levels set up and cutoff set up correctly since by default it cuts off when you aren't talking (and thankfully doesn't have AGC). There is a push to talk mode, but most people that I know don't use it.
Same at Snowdrift.coop. We still try jitsi again every once in a while because we'd like to make joining our meetings more accessible to new contributors, or if we want video. However, jitsi quality tends to degrade in meetings with 5+ people or when one person had a bad connection. Not always, but enough where we've wasted meetings due to struggling with tech. In the end, how well it works matters more than how sexy it is, and the reliability of mumble just can't be beat.
Does this work properly on mobile/without headsets for you?
Our problem was that we had way too much echo/reverb, especially when people were not using headsets. Just having one non-headset user killed it for us. IIRC even one user talking into their phone normally (i.e. no "loudspeaker" setting activated on their phone) killed our conversations because people heard themselves talking. I've tried finding a setting that would be OK to use when no headset is available, but I just couldn't get it to become bearable.
I'd really like to use something self-hosted, but I can't control what devices people use, and users are way too used to simple interfaces. I've also tried a self-hosted Jitsi meet instance more than a year ago, which for some reason has much better echo reduction, but it sometimes didn't work for one or two of our colleagues for unknown reasons, maybe because most of us have Firefox, not Chrome, or mobile browsers.
The android app didn't work on my Sony Z1, but I've since changed phones and it seems to work now.
