> If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).

I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on.

What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management.

Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned.

Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).