If we want an open chat service, I'dd look into Matrix, which is federated like kbin/lemmy. Its also a work in progress, but it does support both text chat and voice/video chat. And it does have rudimentary "spaces" which lets you group channels and such, which makes it easy for people to discover the channels in our community.
Discourse is FOSS and is fairly easy to host. I agree with sentiments that running right back to close source is probably not what the bulk of people here want. But then again most people use steam so I am a walking contradiction.
I think a time will eventually come where we should introduce a chat group… but only once we’ve saturated the available bandwidth that this core community provides. Until then, we should focus on directing conversations into community text posts to drum up activity & interest rather than hiding them with a sidechannel.
FWIW: when the day does come, I’d rather we don’t use Discord. Part of my aversion to Discord is personal – I think it’s a bloated and annoying application – but I mainly just don’t feel like it’s apropos to Lemmy’s culture. We’re on a federated FOSS community, so let’s keep to that and use a federated FOSS chat protocol (i.e.: matrix).
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