A friend in /r/amateurradio posted a discord inviting young hams in New York Long Island. A few commenters (including myself) asked why not all young hams? So here you go!
Credit to /u/NewHamWhoDis KD2OAH
What is Discord?
Discord is a free voice and text chatting app well suited for gamers. Anyone can set up any server and have your squad voice chatting within minutes. Before, TeamSpeak and Mumble (and Ventrilo….and more) were the standard, but required paying for servers or setting up your own. Discord takes the work out of that.
It’s also become hugely popular with the rest of the internet – YouTube channels, subreddits, and many special interest groups (like ham radio) have started using it as a replacement to IRC and VoIP chat programs which are hard to use for both the users, moderators, and admins, and lack adequate mobile device support.
Rant on Chat Apps
Sometimes it’s hard to decide what chat program to use. Slack, Facebook Messenger, IRC, Skype, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Zello, Slack…the list is ever growing, but currently here’s my favorites (because this is a blog after all!)
For groups of collegiate and like-aged (20-somethings) friends casually chatting: GroupMe
Check out the Collegiate Amateur radio Initative GroupMe here!
For one-to-one chatting: Facebook Messenger, SMS, iMessage.
For IRC-like text and voice chatting about a certain topic: Discord
For linux help or nostalgia: IRC
Although there are a lot of very helpful and active communities on IRC, it’s mobile app support is awful since a cloud instance has to be always-on to receive messages when your device isn’t connected, then to push them to your phone when it’s back on, which costs more money than what’s worth to the casual, intermittent user…i.e. me.
For Working on a Project with a remote team: Slack
Mattermost is a good up-and-coming Open Source alternative to Slack.
For all things international: Whatsapp for 1-1 chats, Telegram for groups
YOTA uses Telegram for mass-group texting. I think they’re up to 500 members now.
For pretending your phone is a walkie talkie for a minute than forgetting about it: Zello
For video chatting: Skype.
I pretty much always organize skype chats via Facebook Messenger. Kinda funny.
For video chatting with cool features and/or using a browser only: Google Hangouts
For everything else: Ham radio. Lol.
