A couple of years ago, I created a forum on the ginlo messenger, motivated by two things: give the messenger a push, because my friend Stefan Rubner worked there, and secondly because I wanted to have a place for readers on my site to discuss amongst themselves. I called it vowe’s magic flying circus and it quickly was referred to as the circus.
The circus has been moving a lot, and each time we lost the dead wood. People who had signed up but were not really interested in contributing. If you do not actively contribute, you will lose interest in even reading it. We moved to Microsoft Kaizala, then Telegram, then Signal, and two years ago to Microsoft Teams. I am happy that we moved away from Telegram which has become a dumpster fire.
Teams has proven to be too much overhead for our small operation. You really need to be a Microsoft ship with AAD (Azure Active Directory) to make this work. This is a SNAFU of Microsoft Accounts, AAD Accounts, and everything in-between. I had hopes for the private edition in Windows 11, but that has proven to be utterly useless. It’s closer to Skype than Teams, but not interoperable with Skype. Since I am an active Skype user, something had to give. From my daily use of Skype I know that Skype chat is useless with a few dozen people. I started looking elsewhere.
Two days ago, I started creating two alternative solutions, one built on Keybase.io (yes, it’s more than a directory) and the other one on Discord. And it quickly became obvious that Discord is the better solution.
