Are there any active, free, text-only chat sites that are still going?

[Mechaghostman2]

Facebook and other social media is ok, but it's mostly become a place for people to rave about politics and then re-post memes. Before it was just a site where people were posting pictures of their food and cat and requesting you help them with their virtual farm or something, and I joined it as a new place to discuss guitar playing after the people I like left Ultimate-Guitar and joined FB instead. Even the music groups now though have the aforementioned problems.

Reddit is alright too, certainly nice for finding specific topics you find interesting, but it gets bogged down by ban happy mods and rules requiring you make a post in a very specific way, etc.

Forum sites can be alright, but they can often suffer the same problems of social media and Reddit, just not to the same extent. Still, they're generally a topic-oriented place.

Chat sites are just an anything goes type deal where you can just say what's on your mind with a bunch of random people. The text only ones don't really allow memes, though you can certainly link them. It's not bogged down by mods, or being forced to be topic specific, or just the general drama that you get with other talk-to-stranger sites today. While I'm sure politics can pop up in discussion, it doesn't seem to infest things nearly as much as it does with everything else.

Right now I'm using a free trial of mIRC, but that is only going to last for about 30 days, and honestly I don't think something like that is worth paying money for. It's literally just a place to send text in what's the equivalent now of a large group chat on FB Messenger or something.

Still, I'd like to find a chat site to just talk about random things with random people, and I keep coming up empty handed. So, are there any suggestions for sites I can use?

[onlinebiker]

Longing for the days of your dial up 56k modem and local BBS?

 

BTDT

[no one]

If you are unable to discover the path you seek, establish your own.

[rado84]

Right now I'm using a free trial of mIRC, but that is only going to last for about 30 days

Forget mIRC, it sucks in so many ways, one of which is the extortion for payment. There's HexChat - FOSS program available for Linux. It must be available for Windows too, though I stopped using Windows as a daily OS 4 years ago and I haven't searched to see if a Windows version of HexChat is available.

[Rhizomorph13]

So there is Discord which has a voice component but also multiple rooms can be established by the host. The problem would be finding one that is active and relevant to your interests. I tried to start one here but only got three others to join and one of those was Winterhold and then participation was negligible and now it is a ghost town. I was part of a gaming group for a while and we played a lot of Ark and some Space Engineers but that became a dead end for me as well. I'm sure if I put more effort into finding a good group I could do it; maybe you could too.

---

Here is the link if you're interested in trying to spice it up:

https://discord.gg/F3fC2B2c

Open invite to anyone. It will expire in a day...

[Angrboda]

AF has slack, but I don't know how active it is these days. Most of the regulars that frequented it when I did don't post much these days.

[arewethereyet]

AF has slack, but I don't know how active it is these days.  Most of the regulars that frequented it when I did don't post much these days.

That's 'cause they're all at Slack.