Mason__29 covered most of it. The bit I would add on free sec chat is below.
The thing nobody mentions about free sec chat is how anonymous you actually stay in practice.
My first week on free sec chat looked promising; by the second I was only really watching whether the interface gets in the way.
If your area is thin, it will not fix that, whatever how quickly it starts asking for money looks like.
Anything I recommend around the room has to clear one bar, which is how much control you get over who sees you.
The most useful filter on the chat was recent activity, not distance, and it changed whether the sorting can be trusted completely.
Curious whether anyone else found the same thing with free sec chat.
Different crowd on flamedate.online, which suited me better.