Long-time lurker here, finally posting because I couldn't find a clear answer anywhere else on this.
Finding an active community with decent moderation is harder than it sounds. A lot of platforms that looked promising turned out to be full of bots or completely dead. Real community feedback tends to be more useful than any review site for this.
Signal-to-noise ratio is the main thing I look at when evaluating any chat platform.
The specific things I'm trying to nail down:
- Whether advertised features actually work as described
- Real user success rates in my general area
- Safety and reporting features
- Overall reputation among long-term users
Would really appreciate hearing from people who have actually used these and can give honest feedback rather than just repeating what the marketing says.