Mumble is great for audio chat, but I would not wish its text chat on everyone. For an audio application it is light on your resources, but not good enough to leave on perpetually since it will keep checking the mics which makes it great for idling in when you want to audio chat, but not good if you don’t want that noise. I run & use my server regularly, but I log out when I need to focus or to save battery. I think it works better as an auxiliary place to chill or for meetings & is better paired with a different application for text chat & keeping on more or less always (where that other chat probably shouldn’t be Matrix—not just for installation but the resources required to run it). You will also get iOS folks crying there aren’t any great ports since it costs money to be on the Apple Store, FOSS doesn’t have deep pockets, & GPL is banned.
toastal
Less than 30? Self-host an Ejabberd server on an old desktop under some desk for private message & multiuser chats + Jitsi which handshakes over the same protocol as the chats, XMPP. If you need some unified UI for everyone & a bit of posts, Movim can also sit on top of the XMPP server. If need need some low-latency, low-resource audio chat, let folks idle in a Murmur server.
Matrix uses way too many resources & is way too slow/inefficient at the protocol level.
You are really gonna want something beyond Markdown if you are taking anything other than the most basic of notes. Markdown lacks so, so many features & you will likely end up buying into some incompatible fork like the one behind Obsidian.
A lot of the world can’t just drink tap water with a basic filter
& abduco can work if you only need attach/detach
It’s just drinks & ice cream—but incredibly inexpensive. I see a lot of kids go after school, some dates, or get something iced to deal with the heat.
Last 2 years it has swept all over Thailand with clones across the street.
It also functions as a PWA (progressive web app) for those that want those features. The underlying chat protocol has many native clients as well for everyone to have a low-power, low-data-consumption option for encrypted chat, both direct messages & chat rooms.
Pijul decouples your identity from you commits & proves your SSH key ownership. It is a beautiful thing that you can change your name or email & not have to get a force push to update all that info since you are now just identified by the primary key from the identity server. No more worries about being embarrassed by your old Protonmail or GMail account,no more dead names in the commit history, & no care about identity stealing by just changing the config.