Free opensource chat?

[Steve]

I just don't have time to keep watch on multiple windows and chats.

But you're talking about setting up your own chat system, which is far more work, and lamenting the loss of FB messenger, so this confuses me

I don't know why Discord even exists. Just assume the new kids don't wanna use old stuff like IRC and redid the whole thing..

I speak from experience (I spent many years in IRC during my Quake gaming years) IRC is great, I really love it, but it isn't suited to the 'modern' web. Discord lets you paste multimedia, pictures etc, which is great when you're talking electronics and just want to share a photo of a PCB for discussion etc. If you're going to go to the effort of setting something up, it should be fit for purpose, like this kind of thing I just described.

Plus going by how I get banned from 3rd party stuff constantly, I don't want to rely on 3rd party stuff which I have no control over..

I agree with Alex here... I created the Atari Freemint Discord (So I speak from experience). How hard was it to set up? A few clicks... How much management does it need from me? Literally none, have we ever had issues/spammers? I don't think so. I don't see how any Discord channel could randomly be taken down, I'm in a few electronics channels and they've been around for years without any problems. You can set moderators, so if there was any spam, it's not all down to you to sort out.