I have been in a group chat with 2 of my closet friends for more than 10 years now, and we have been using Facebook messenger for that entire time. However, there has always been interest in migrating to a different platform, but so far we have not been able to land on a good alternative. We have gotten very used to some of the messenger features and have disliked alternatives for lacking these features. I was wondering if anyone could suggest some solutions here, up to and including a DIY (maybe IRC?) approach.

The features we really liked from messenger:

• Nicknames, and ability to tag by nickname
• Emoji hotkey (where you have quick access to a selected emoji, we use this for a lot of in-jokes)
• Chat theme and customization
• easy cross-platform or browser based (we are a mix of mac/pc, and iphone/android users)

Features we really do not need and in fact get in the way:

• Different channels or rooms
• voice/video
• screen sharing

Features that aren't necessary but could be nice:

• bots

Does anyone have suggestions for alternatives to messenger that hit these points? We have tried Discord, but found it was way too feature heavy for how we use it, and lacked some really basic features we liked from messenger. Whatsapp was a decent replacement, but lack of themes and emoji hotkey made it less enjoyable for us than messenger, plus it is also a Meta platform which eliminated one of the main reasons we wanted to switch.

I have half a mind to set up an IRC channel for us, but it's been many years at this point since I've used IRC, so I don't know what that ecosystem is like these days, and how easy it would be to get my non-tech-savvy friends on board.

(perhaps this is better suited to ~tech, but I am posting here with an eye towards DIY solutions, although to reiterate I would also be happy with an out-of-the-box alternative)

I was a bit worried about the future of Google Voice with the demise of Hangouts, but I got an email from GSuite about classic Hangouts today, which linked to this support page. Coming to Hangouts Chat are:

• Enhanced video calling experience

• Google Voice integration

I included the video calling line because I thought it was a bit odd for Chat to have that - I thought that's what Hangouts Meet was for (though it certainly wouldn't be the first case of Google making a redundant product). In any case, if Chat is going to have video calling, it's not much of a stretch to assume it'll also have voice calling for Google Voice, in addition to SMS/MMS.

Self-post instead of a link post because I want to highlight just 2 bullet points in the support page that wouldn't be obvious if I just linked the page. I wasn't sure if this should go in ~tech or ~comp, but ~comp seems to have more non-link discussion than ~tech.

Edit: Somewhat related, I found a news article about the Google Voice 5.7 update. They've created some interesting Google Calendar integrations, which makes sense since Voice will be available in GSuite this March.