Balemi

I've been in the tech industry a long time and while younger me would have preferred a more techy platform like Matrix older me definitely prefers the ease of use of Discord. I feel like how to best make these kinds of platforms is solved well enough now that I don't want to bother with something more difficult to use unless I feel a strong motivation to do so.

I haven't looked lately but Matrix didn't do voice + text chat coherently last time I did either which made it a non-starter.

PHP is fine. Lets not forget it's been used by the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia etc. which are much bigger websites then Kbin.