Me and a group of 17 friends and going stronger are using a sort of social networking tool/chat room called Slack. It's basically like an instant messaging board within rooms your create or between yourself and a specific user. It's primarily used for businesses but it's working quite well for us all just chatting and goofing off.

Some features include:

- Plenty of customization options for users
- A great deal of control for Admins and Owners
- Emoji galore
- Pictures and YouTube links unfurl in the chat, unless you have that turned off in your personal settings
- Admins and Owners can install other programs and extensions, like bots

Arm yourselves with knowledge https://slack.com/

I'm the owner of the current Slack group I'm a part of, so if y'all have any questions, let me know.

If you'd like I can create an unofficial one and just hand over the ownership status to an admin here after teaching them the ropes.

Sending invites to said Slack requires an email address from the person requesting an invitation though, which kind of sucks IMO. So yeah, this theoretical Slack community won't be that big I take it, considering how few of us are active on the forums. (BTW sorry for not being active here in 5ever)

I'll let y'all think it over.

Oh and to clarify I'm using the free version. The paid version has more features and can store more than 10,000 messages at once.

I guess this particular page gives more information

https://slack.com/is

https://slack.com/pricing for lists of features at each price level, including free

I wouldn't do that, while we have a Dragonfruit Slack team (with staff from e621, F-List, and BD forums) there are a couple privacy concerns floating around for complete Internet strangers.

The biggest problems are: Public channels are public to everyone, but team owners can delete private groups at will, an email must be forked over to the owner of the team for an invite, and is then visible to all members, all profile information is visible to everyone else on the team, bot integrations can compromise privacy as well (aka making logs).
One asshole option is also the business feature, if the team owner decides to go paid with the highest tier he can request slack to show all conversations, ever made, for all user, even direct messages and private groups he wasn't a part of.
This would cost ~12USD per user active in the last two weeks, but kick everyone off of the team, wait two weeks and it becomes pretty damn affordable. Requesting that information would notify all users (even past ones) but at that point he would already have the database on a CD in his mail.

I would personally recommend Skype group chats or something similar for strangers, and slack for groups of people that already know each other for a longer time, or businesses.

Source of the knowledge above is that I am an admin on the dragonfruit slack team.

Edit: Also, so that nobody gets me wrong: Slack is the most amazing, well thought out group chat I ever had the pleasure of using, I wish Skype was half the program slack is but sadly it's programmed by idiots. But I still would not recommend a slack team as a chat program for Internet strangers because it is clearly geared towards business chat, and not private conversations between strangers.

NotMeNotYou said:
I wouldn't do that, while we have a Dragonfruit Slack team (with staff from e621, F-List, and BD forums) there are a couple privacy concerns floating around for complete Internet strangers.

The biggest problems are: Public channels are public to everyone, but team owners can delete private groups at will, an email must be forked over to the owner of the team for an invite, and is then visible to all members, all profile information is visible to everyone else on the team, bot integrations can compromise privacy as well (aka making logs).
One asshole option is also the business feature, if the team owner decides to go paid with the highest tier he can request slack to show all conversations, ever made, for all user, even direct messages and private groups he wasn't a part of.
This would cost ~12USD per user active in the last two weeks, but kick everyone off of the team, wait two weeks and it becomes pretty damn affordable. Requesting that information would notify all users (even past ones) but at that point he would already have the database on a CD in his mail.

I would personally recommend Skype group chats or something similar for strangers, and slack for groups of people that already know each other for a longer time, or businesses.

Source of the knowledge above is that I am an admin on the dragonfruit slack team.

Edit: Also, so that nobody gets me wrong: Slack is the most amazing, well thought out group chat I ever had the pleasure of using, I wish Skype was half the program slack is but sadly it's programmed by idiots. But I still would not recommend a slack team as a chat program for Internet strangers because it is clearly geared towards business chat, and not private conversations between strangers.

So in other words, Slack only works if nobody, especially those in charge, is an asshole. I guess that's why it's working out for my group then.

FatherOfGray said:
So in other words, Slack only works if nobody, especially those in charge, is an asshole. I guess that's why it's working out for my group then.

Under friends? Yes. Otherwise it's definitely geared towards being used as a tool for work structures or other teams where you want to hold people responsible to their actions, if needed.

I do wish they would start a "public" team that works like Skype and co (since Slack wonderfully supports being in more than one team) because that would mean those privacy concerns no longer exist and it would be possible to completely and forever ditch Skype (except for video calls and conferences).