PWA app only is a big no sale.

As much as I dislike dedicated apps for things that don't need it, THIS is something that needs it.

It would be nice having native programs. At least you can use any native xmpp app with the same account to do text, audio, and visual comms (including groups). The only thing they don't support is the actual social feeds/posts aspect (and soon spaces!).

This is indeed excellent and they are currently working hard on making it a nice alternative to Discord.

Our Lemmy instance has been running it as a supplementary service for quite some time now and it is relatively popular with our members: https://movim.slrpnk.net/

Are there bridges to WhatsApp and telegram?

Movim has good support for https://slidge.im/ based gateways that include WhatsApp and Telegram.

Any decent native client (Pidgin, Conversations, Gajim, etc) will cover most of the important stuff, so it might be worth checking who among those might be willing (+ people contributing) to track development after Movim.

Oh man, seeing folks suggest it as a Discord alternative always had me uninterested, because I don't even use Discord and it just seemed like yet-another-standard.
Now I'm reading this really technical title for a talk which mentions XMPP and I'm instantly sold.

Well, to be honest, "Movim" also sounded like a VC-funded startup. Looks like it's a bus-factor-of-1 open-source project instead, which I have significantly more trust in.

You have to ask whoever is running the server but it is possible