Hello FOSSers 
Discourse has introduced a group chat feature. We use Discourse, an open source forum software, for this community.
This gives an IRC/Discourse like channel where you can send messages to interact with regular members.
The group chat feature could be a quick way to chit-chat between members without creating a new topic. For anything specific, a new thread should be created.
Let me know if this is something you would like to experiment with 
We already have messages , which I do use.
Can you tell us what a group or channel might be?
I assume chat is for little short messages
Indeed it is for short messages and more than two people can participate in the discussion.
OK, so is chat public, or is it for members of a group maybe?
Not for me, too involved with other things and prefer the current format where we can read the ongoing questions and learn from the answers
Iām not sure I understand āDiscourseā āIRCā channel, but I have seen groups using Discord, etc. and even Matrix, but I never get any replies or help, except on one FOSS app, and even that is delayed greatly. I donāt mind having it if, as you say, we can chat about things we donāt feel necessarily need a new topic here, but seems if it is helpful to anything FOSS or Linux, it needs to be seen here. I guess my question is: is it contained here? Or this another app I need to monitor?
That is a key point. The itsFOSS forum works, because everyone can see it.
We dont want to undermine that.
I think I am with you Paul.
The thing that suits me about itsFOSS forum is that I can do it in my time. I dont need something like a phone call that demands immediate attention.
I think it could be nice to chat about little things that donāt warrant a full forum post. Although as I say that, I am not sure how much I would use it - I am a pretty busy person, so I canāt imagine me using it often, but maybe I would if it happened to be pretty popular.
@nevj I donāt think it would be like a phone call - I think you could just drop in to chat and then when your attention goes elsewhere or you have something else to do, just stop chatting.
It is part of the forum itself. Youāll see a collapsable message box at the bottom (the kind you see on Facebook).
It will be public but for specific group members only. For example, I can create a channel for members with trust Level 3 and above. Only they can see the chats and participate in it (if they want).
It is for small talks that donāt require dedicated threads.
I believe most of the active members are either not sure about this feature or they donāt want it.
I sure donāt want to force anything but if you are unsure of the feature, here are some details:
I hsd a look at your link. It solves the problem of starting a private message and then wishing you had made it a public topic, like I did recently. As we discovered changing a message into a topic
can be done but is difficult and requires privilege.
Going the other way is an issue too. Sometimes big topics degenerate into offtopic chat.
The dominant view seems to be that a number of our contributors are too busy for idle chat.
They like to help with big problems and interesting discussions, but then draw a line.
Just some points. I dont want to push this one way or the other.