All this talk about Discord replacements plus my own experience attempting to host a Synapse has got me wondering why it seems so hard to implement voice chat.
Stupid idea: back in 2022 I got an Asterisk server working on a raspberry pi over AREDN without too much trouble. What’s stopping people from just using a PBX like that for voice chat?
As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.
TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You can build a voice server that just exposes a TCP port, but… latency. And corporate firewalls love to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.