Reimagining Messaging

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?

# Group chats rule the world Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, r... See more

There is a dearth of innovation in chat . It’s all weighed down by network effects. If you’re a developer, not only do you have to create your cool new feature (see Houseparty or Squadapp), you also need to bootstrap a network so that your users have friends to chat with.

There is a similar pattern for chat apps: WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat all have at least 100 million users. Why doesn’t the market tip in favor of one or two of them as the literature suggests?

Startups, on the other hand, have the advantage that they can start small, and grow, which is why some of the largest networked products in the industry—eBay, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and TikTok—started with small, atomic networks. Respectively, these initial networks began in collectibles, college students, limos for rich people, airbeds and breakf

... See more