A while ago, there was a project involving setting up some sort of Forum for arranging social events outside of Meetup and Facebook for a group of friends.

Webs Domains were purchased, web space was purchased and Multiple Examples were set up for evaluation including Oxwall, Adhoc BuddyPress, PHPBB3, Family Connections, and some cloud hosted services such as Google+, Google Groups, even a try of Meetup itself (Seriously derailed).

After capitulating last year and allowing myself to be assimilated into the Face-borg collective, I now have an understanding what they really meant by “Forum”, it wasn’t a web based forum at all that I assumed many were thinking of, it’s basically a chat / instant messaging program they were talking about.

After reviewing Slack, Mattermost, Tox Chat among others, came across Riot.IM / Matrix.org. The Riot.IM product appears to cover most of the main points I’ve been looking out for…

• Federated open inter-operable standard. (Can host your own server and get it talk to other servers), much in the same way Email is currently.
• Open Source
• Option to Encrypt the group chat.
• Option to make it private or public.
• Ability to attach pictures
• Emoji’s (All important to some)

The example chatroom I set up “Tarawera” seems to work okay on my Windows 10 Desktop using the Google Chrome Browser and also using the Riot.IM app on my Xperia Z2 Android device.

Now, apparently there’s voice chat available. There’s an Icon on the web-based interface for it, but haven’t tried it out yet,

In short, this is probably my best chance so far at trying to release the grip that the proprietary corporate platforms (Such as Facebook and WeChat) currently have on my friends for communicating with one another.

If anyone would like to try, please contact me and will send you an invite.