> One more thing: I am well aware that Skype was also used to make calls to landlines and mobile phones across borders, but this is a feature that is hard to replicate, and somewhat of an add-on. If you need that kind of feature, you will have to rely on other apps on phone or websites that propose such services. Consider this out of scope for the present discussion.

Not sure about other people, but this was the only feature that I used Skype for (i.e. cheap calls to home country landlines while residing abroad).

Does anyone have a trustworthy recommendation that's similar to what Skype offered?

For myself I just spool up a galene instance when I want to video chat someone, (honestly almost never, so not really a great recommendation ). but it is pretty easy to get running on my obsd vps.

https://galene.org/

The theory is that instead of sitting on some third party centralized video chat service, I can sit on my own, and if anybody wants to talk they can "call" me by joining in. I theory I would "call" them by joining their instance, but... yeah, you can stop laughing now. but yeah, it does turn out that I am only one in my small circle of friends and family who likes running a server.

There are better alternatives that do not use electron because each time you use a program based on electron it tells Google what you are doing, it connects to Google. It's like vscode based on electron but that also connects to all Microsoft related crap.

Source needed. Based on my reading it only tracks users if the developer has configured tracking and there is no inherent tracking.

There is no information in this article whether you can share your screen wuth Matrix (essential for any serious meeting) Can you?

To me the conclusion would be that there are no serious alternatives. Or did I miss something?