CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@mildpeach We use signal for one on one contains but it doesn't really work for multi-channel group stuff.

Instant message clients should be instant message clients and chat rooms should be chat rooms

@mildpeach Ah this is an existing discord we are all using for weekly movie nights and coordinating D&D night, we just don't want to use discord for that anymore

@mildpeach I talked with a friend and she said for a small group (less them 25 people or so?) it should only cost around $5/month for text and voice chat, some file sharing, and some web hosting

@hc I think a community maintained index would be excellent for that sort of thing, or something similar to what TeamSpeak has where they've got a map of all the TeamSpeak hosting companies and you can just click on the city and find who as a server in that city.

TeamSpeak's map is very out of date, but I was still able to find and pay for a hosting provider with it

@glent I'm skeptical that most of them have ip6 addresses. They really should but whenever I check, especially with budget ISPs they don't...

Also, that's a much faster upload speed than just about anywhere I've ever lived

So if you are the sort of person who has a lot of experience hosting things, and wants people to use centralized services left, maybe make a business selling that type of on-demand hosting but for zulip or Matrix or Stout or whatever!

Like I wanted to spin up a private TeamSpeak server and I just enter how many users I want to be on at the same time, pick a name and select what domain name I want from a drop-down list and enter my credit card number and it charges me $3 a month and everything just works

The flip side is it turns out for certain things. this is way easier than you'd expect, because there's companies whose entire business model is making it. so you just enter a credit card number and they make everything else work for you.

@Kyresti Very glad to hear that this isn't just me

plus as I understand this will all have to be done on the command line

I don't think programmers and sysadmins get how much there is to learn and how intimidating it is for normal people to host their own software.

For one most of us don't have a computer that is running 24/7, which means we need to rent a server which we have no idea how to go about doing.

And then there's an entire arcane art to running software that can speak to the internet without your server being taken over and used to send spam to half the planet