This is Gods way of telling us all to move to IRC. The one and only true chat client.
Is there a DLN irc room? If not, let’s make one! telegram works, and I guess I don’t object strongly to it, but it’s no weechat…
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Matrix 
No need for bouncers and mobile app too for those weird creatures who likes keyboards from hell.
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This would work. Although, you know. It’s still just basically IRC with a sheen of GUI. At least there are CLI options. I can matrix from weechat!
IRC is not the only thing going. There is an open source alternative to most things, even the likes Discord, where they have been censoring, and shutting down people’s channels after bogus hit-pieces are written on on some “news” site.
@onesubtractone DL does have a IRC channel #destinationlinux on freenode.
@Tiedemann DL is also on matrix, https://riot.im/app/#/room/#destinationlinux:matrix.org
@Trent what is the open source alternative to Discord?
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Here it is, Basically identical to Discord:
Looks like you have already linked it above.
Riot/Matrix is very far from Discord in many ways but the biggest being the voice chat in Matrix is subpar at best just in quality and because it isnt laid out in a channel structure but rather an IRC structure.
Riot/Matrix + Mumble would be closer to Discord but thats a combination of services. I dont think an open source Discord alternative exists at this point.
yes, within 2 seconds I can tell that is Matrix/Riot
They offer different purposes. Matrix/Riot is a Slack alternative not a Discord alternative. The voice chat in Matrix/Riot is an after-thought which is why it is so clunky to use. Discord’s main focus is multiuser voice chat. Discord is a combination of Mumble + Slack. Matrix/Riot is essentially an open source Slack.
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I appreciate that you’ve set up multiple options (IRC, Matrix, and Mumble, and Telegram), but I think the community will be too watered down if there are too many choices. Since this is an Open Source-centric community, it makes sense, IMHO, to pick Open Source choices for the ways to communicate, through and through.
I would personally not miss IRC (phone-unfriendly), or Telegram (proprietary), if those options disappeared. I think Matrix and Mumble compliment each other, and I would personally like to see those as the the go-to-choices (if not the only choices), outside Discourse.
Maybe some kind of community vote could help to pare it down?
Mumble is a real-time only communication platform, we offer it because we want to but its only so useful. If Mumble had a true chat element then it could be a competitor to Discord but because it doesn’t, it isn’t.
We have Matrix/Riot because it integrates with IRC fairly well but it’s not the cleanest experience.
Telegram is a popular platform so having a group there makes sense, same thing with Discord.
Limiting platforms to only open source platforms is a thing I won’t do because thats essentially creating an echo chamber. I am a marketer and one of the pillars of marketing is go to where the audience is. It is possible to move audiences with a lot of effort but if you aren’t going to participate where they already are then they will not even know about the other options to even consider moving.
With that said, I am working on a bridging system to integrate the various chat systems into each other so no matter which one is picked, its the same conversation. This could be problematic as well but we will see.
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Fair enough, however if you made a Facebook page (because, hey, that’s where everyone is), then I would consider that to be in poor taste.
This is very interesting… in my thought experiments it uses a dedicated account to scrape text and act as the bridge prefixing shared messages with the name and location of the user it’s repeating. Something like…
DLN_bridge: [Ulfnic@IRC] Hey all.
Maybe the location isn’t as important but it makes the role the bridge is playing more intuitive.
My only concern is making sure people know their text will get shotgunned over a bunch of 3rd parties but if you have a bot watching channels it can easily throw a PM disclaimer.
The other concern is as DLN grows it’ll fill all chats with a cacophony of scrolling text, there’s already some utility to partitioning things up a bit though there’s other solutions like breaking DLN bridge chats into categories.
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Staying out of the open source side of the debate. As to only how many is too many I’m in the frame of mine where the ideal situation is for a community to have two main methods of communication. One synchronous, such as Slack, or Discord, or IRC. Secondly a form of asynchronous communication, such as Discourse, or a mailing list.
It seems to cover most peoples needs as some people want the near real-time social aspect, and others are more interested in building up small bits of information that can be referenced back to over long periods of time. Random forum posts don’t seem important in the moment, but anytime I’m trying to resolve a tech issue I am FAR more likely to find the solution in a random community forum post than I am from the actual forums or support pages of the vendor with the product that I’m having the issue with.
(PSA: Please for the love of all that is good if you post a tech question and find a solution please go back to the thread and report what that solution is, for posterity)
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I disagree. I think you are saying this because of a perception of hypocrisy. I think being on a platform for the purpose of spreading information to users about a show that expresses the downsides of said platform is doing a social service. If I were to say “you shouldn’t use facebook” as a casual user and then were to use the site as a casual user for personal related actions then I’d agree that’s hypocritical. On the other hand, we use Facebook because people are on the platform and having a conversation with them to leave the platform or consider alternatives requires the conversation be had on that platform. If the sole purpose of using Facebook is informing people of the issues with Facebook and letting people know about the show, then I do not feel that is at all hypocritical.
That is essentially exactly what the intention is. 
I want to make sure people are aware of its a bridge message, who is sending it and what platform they are sending the message from. 
This is an issue because not all platforms allow PMs or what not. I suppose maybe a welcome message when people join on the platforms that don’t allow PMs could work. I will look into it.
Some platforms allow for breaking it up and others that don’t. I suppose its going to be a learning phase to find out what all works and what doesn’t.
I agree this is true but its hard to pick a single solution on the real time chat portion due to wanting something reliable and easy to use while at the same time being able to count on it long term. IRC would be ideal if it was modernized and able to be used in a Telegram style. Unfortunately, that’s not a possibility.
The asynchronous portion is totally covered with this forum. 
I could not agree more! I think I will also add a way on this forum that people can choose specific messages as solution so its easier to see what the OP determines as the solution.