We should be wary of feature creep. Lemmy is a link aggregator, that’s it. I don’t see why lemmy should also have a chat feature. If you want to have a discussion outside of lemmy in a traditional chatroom, then just use Matrix/Discord/XMPP/etc.
Some associations and cooperatives offer email accounts as a free trial. If you live in France, you can get almost all your Internet services provided by associations/cooperatives: https://chatons.org/. This has the benefit of you being a “member” and not “customer”/“client” of the organisation, but this means you have to pay a yearly subscription
My university is going to set up a Mattermost service because every major and student club is using Discord, even some classes are using it, which is a shame. What also really bothers me is that since the crisis began a year ago, we’re still using Blackboard Collaborate which is proprietary, I don’t see why we don’t use BigBlueButton
Rotten Tomatoes is a commercial product and is owned by the major US media conglomerates. We’re looking for an open source alternative.