no no no no no

( cut for sad news about a child )

first pass: group video chat with Discord

i know Discord is all the rage with fandom, but i hadn't been pulled in yet. but when i was looking for a free group video chat that would do a Brady Bunch view with no time/OS/hardware limits, Discord seemed like a good bet.

verdict: it was good overall.

pros:

• dead easy signup


• group video tiles beautifully and the quality is good


• chat groups are persistent and named


• you can create and share invite links easily


• the "server" is a persistent text and voice forum you can use to gather your friends


• Discord design is charming and attractive

cons:

• video is only as a direct message - so video chat is independent from the server where you have gathered your friends and is not discoverable per se


• when you bring in new people you may lose them into the audio channel before they find your video invite


• video chat invite links expire and you can't choose the duration


• echo. it didn't happen for everyone (i assume it was hardware-dependent) but i strongly advise wearing headphones if you don't have a headset or other clean separation of microphone and speaker.


the system i came up with (there might be a better way) was to create an empty video chat group, then post the invite link in the general channel of our server for folks to discover.

we had up to seven folks on at once tonight and it was pleasant, will try again next week.