So I was using an older Redis from the experiencemaster.com build. I attempted to migrate to Digital Ocean, but … they require TLS encryption, which django-channels doesn’t explicitly support. I’d have to really dig into it, so I ended up giving up, and causing my existing redis instance to upgrade to 6… Now all of that is happy again, and the core is running on the very latest builds of the core libraries. Latest Django still isn’t explicitly available with native EC2, again I can attempt, but I didn’t want to deal with anything that wasn’t “as intended.” Lots of other things have been touched on the way by.