I need to set up a family chat room. I need a technology that will support users from multiple generations, all devices, and won’t start any fights.
What is your answer to this impossible question?
@cliffordbeshers By "chat room" do you mean an old-school shared text conversation or a video chat application?
@gregmoore Well... yes? Text, but maybe slack's ability to start a video chat would be good? Multi-person text and email threads aren't doing it. Open to any and all suggestions beyond that. We're a group of siblings, spouses, in-laws, all trying to help out with elder care. At times, there's nothing, other times chatter increases exponentially...
@gregmoore One thing I like about google meet is that we have manage to create a stable chat room, so we can just go to a bookmarked url to join the perpetual "scrum".
@cliffordbeshers Slack is a good one. I have had a fantastic experience with private Discord servers. If you ignore their marketing focus on games, it is a wonderful private text chat that you can create as many, or as few, topic channels as you want. It also is super easy to have audio and video calls on it for many hours. (My friends and I use it for a video call every week for 3-4 hours.)
@sod My experience with signal is a few years out of date, but it was very tech heavy, and some of us...are not. Has it changed?
@ritchie Last time I tried to join WhatsApp, they wouldn't accept my VoIP number. I'm leary of them because I'd have to carry a $15/month number just to use their service. My European niblings would like it, though.
@cliffordbeshers @sod I was going to suggest Signal also. Apart from their nagging of "remember you signal pin-number" it's basically like any other chat app
@jemostrom @sod Except you can't use it from a web browser, as far as I can tell. I include that in "all devices".
@cliffordbeshers @sod how about Matrix? I looks interesting, but I’m not sure how user-friendly it is.
@cliffordbeshers we use whatsapp for the family group. it's not the best, but it's super easy and does the job. most importantly, everyone has it already.
@gregmoore @sod @ritchie @jemostrom @otaviocc @pcora
Thank you all for the input. Most of these answers I knew, and have excluded for various reasons, but it's good to know the field.
In the end, I started a google chat room, because it was easy. Likely nobody will show up and I'll move on until I find something that does work.