Last year, I said to Partner 1 that we’d know we made it as a spanking party when someone created an unofficial Telegram for our event. Lo and behold, the very next day someone messaged me that she’d created an unofficial Telegram for GASP. Earlier this year I worked with her to make it official and transfer the ownership to our group, and it’s had some activity.

Thing is, when I created AASS I specifically chose Discord as our chat server of choice for various reasons, not the least of which was that you could have channels on a Discord server, whereas a Telegram chat could not. Telegram has since implemented topics, which is like channels, and that’s great, but there’s a lot more you can do with Discord. We have several security bots and processes running on our server to keep bad actors away — something that I don’t think is possible with Telegram. Plus, as a regular Telegram user (I use it to chat with Partner 2 as well as several of my friends) I constantly get bombarded with spam chat invites and added to crypto groups from which I then have to remove myself.

All three of the other major spanking parties have Telegram chats — TASSP, Oasis, and Lone Star. Currently only GASP and Oasis use topics. TASSP and Lone Star also have Discord servers, and while the TASSP one gets used from time to time, the Lone Star one has been pretty silent of late. The last Lone Star, back in November, was pretty much solely a Telegram thing. Not because that’s what the organizers chose, but because that’s what the people chose.

I have a lot of spanko friends on Telegram. It’s very useful in that you can anonymize yourself and still have a 1:1 conversation without giving your phone number — you just have to give someone a t.me link with your username in it, and tell Telegram not to share your phone number. But I still prefer Discord — its video and voice chat functions are better than Telegram’s (in my experience), and it’s just better organized all around.

Why do spankos love Telegram so much, though? Is it just because of the anonymous chat feature? Is its app better than Discord’s? (Both apps have their pros and cons, in my opinion.) Is it just where spankos started to congregate and form chat groups, and the love of Telegram is more habit than anything else? I truly don’t know.

But what I do know is that, at least for GASP, the first place you should always look for information is in our Discord.

And hey, at least it’s not Facebook. Looking at you, Frolicon…