I don’t think it got worse. At least in regards to webcams. It looks more like that for many years they essentially re-used the same sensors in different cams and didn’t really evolve. Which always seemed weird, given that smartphone with fantastic sensors have been around for ages now - with lenses which are likely even smaller than what a webcam would be able to allow. Only the relatively recent home office trend has brought some change. But so far it still doesn’t look too good.

It was a Logitech C922. It’s a piece of shit though. A bit less than other webcams I had, but I can’t even properly key out my greenscreen if the lighting in the room is not 100% perfect. With the smartphone cam it works even with completly shitty lighting.

The only webcam I would have somewhat hope in would be the Obsbot Tiny 2, but €350 is too much for something I can solve with an old smartphone. (Also I don’t need 70% of the features of the obsbot tiny; I mainly want a good sensor and image processing.)

I bought one of those arms you can attach to the desk and then position as necessary. They have a standard ISO mount you can use for cams, microphones, etc… I also attached my normal webcam to it before. No I have a smartphone mount (this one, to be precise) on it.

True, you will need 10 to 20 seconds setup each time. But the video quality is really impressive. And another upside: you can be damn sure that no one watches you without you knowing, because you have to setup the cam each time and it doesn’t just sit there. But I guess that’s only a minor advantage.

I put up a specific mount to quickly put the smartphone in place and have a dedicated charger cable right beside it I just need to attach real quick. If I used my iPhone, I could probably make use of the MagSafe mechanism to mount and charge in one go. (I think there are also MagSafe compatible cases for other phones, so that might be something to think about in general.)

Do you have an old SmartPhone lying around? Or could you put aside your SmartPhone during those usage scenarios? Then grab DroidCam (or rather DroidCam OBS, if you mainly need it together with OBS) and you have a camera quality that can compete with dedicated cameras (not webcams). Almost all webcams suck hard in comparison.

As long as Signal requires my phone number, it’s a hard NO for me. I don’t care how good they encrypt if the first thing they do is require one of my most personal identifiers.

Threema has a very good model in that regard.

Unless I just miss it: it’s not self-hostable, right? So it’s open source but currently requires their infrastructure to be usable?

I think both protect from different threat vectors.

A VPN provider can anonymize you but you have to trust them to not use the backchannel in any way (and of course to not actually log everything you do).

Hosting your own VPN isn’t anonymous anymore, since the final connection still leads back to you. But it can properly shield you from untrusted public networks and you can be sure, that you are private, since you are in your own network then.

Another vote for CryptPad. Very polished and nice to work with.