In these times of social isolation it is important to still keep communities together through communication.

Communication can be done via phone or text messaging - if you need a cheap way of doing this there are now many plans which have unlimited local calls and sms for about $10 a month.

If you want to keep in touch via the internet (with video) please think of your privacy.

For person to person communication I recommend signal.org - these people wrote the encryption for WhatsApp. Signal has end to end encryption does video and is available for both iOS and Android. Signal also has many privacy features.

For group video chat Jami.net has encryption and is available for most platforms MS, OSX, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS. It also runs better on older hardware. I have tested this on low spec. GNU/Linux machines and it works better than most alternatives with limited resources.

Unfortunately after some more testing Jami does not seem to have the clarity of some of the commercial alternatives (some of which are free). Zoom, Skype and Teams all have GNU/Linux clients.