Getty Images; iStock; Natalie Ammari/BI
In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.
While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.
"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."
In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.
It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.
"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.
The candid nature of group chats gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy.
By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.
In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.
Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."
The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.
Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
