My friends and I are hosting a Linux and FOSS group chat to have some casual chat, help, and anything related to the topic really. We chose this platform to chat on to keep a privacy preserving way to engage with one another.
Having a public chat group inevitably devolves into an endless waterfall of messages. I dunno how you do it. I can barely stand being a group with 5 people.
I agree here. As much as I hate Discord, it would be much better geared for this. Have you considered Revolt? I haven't tried it myself, but it is the most prominent open source solution to Discord.