I was thinking about how nice it would be to have a more immediate method of chatting with y’all, and was wondering if anyone had any interest in joining some sort of hosted chat? I’d rather avoid slack and/or discord, since they’re centralized services and, well… that doesn’t seem like a great fit for the mesh. 
matrix.org is a federated chat service. Anyone can join from various home-servers and use any client they’d like, but it still keeps persistent and searchable chat logs like slack and discord. Think of it like slack and email had a baby. You can connect from the host of your choice, but chat with anyone from any other host seamlessly.
My personal client of preference is Riot. In addition to having a much more understandable introduction to matrix than I gave above, they also recently introduced a “communities” feature like discord has, or like slack teams. If you’d be interested in joining, it’s as simple as: