With Discord announcing their new facial recognition requirements to get off the Teen version of Discord, I am 100% done. To be honest, wouldn't have taken much, but I can see this being a big snowball effect, and I honestly don't really trust them with my data regardless, let alone my face.

So personally I really love these forums. I think I'd like to keep most of our text chatter happening here. It feels like it suits the speed of the community, and I think it takes away from the need to be "always on" with notifications.

But I also know that some people do prefer the instant messaging, but we definitely need a voice comms solution. So I have a few ideas.

1 - We start a Mumble server

This would be a voice only server. You go there to VC, and you are hanging out / text chatting here on the forums.
https://www.mumble.info

2 - We start a Matrix server

This is an E2E Encrypted chat service that functions a lot like Discord, is open source, and does support voice and video.
https://element.io/en

3 - We check out the new Steam Chat features

Steam has done A LOT of work on their chat app, and it supports everything that Discord does, and more to be honest. You can create group chats that have specific channels and everything like that, and considering 9/10 times we do any gaming together it is on Steam, it KINDA makes sense on paper.

https://steamcommunity.com/updates/chatupdate

Let me know what you folks want to explore and I will set up this week. No matter what though, if you are all down, I'd really like to keep the forums a place for us. It's been a really nice month just chatting with you all with more considered conversations, and having time to THINK about responding rather than just blurting out stuff.