It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.

Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.

It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

I doubt the deposits were for the full cost, right?