Group Chats Deserve Better Than Group Chats
The last honest place online has no albums, no history worth searching and no way to leave.
Ask where people actually share things now and the answer is a group chat. Ask them to find a photograph from two summers ago and watch what happens.
What Group Chats Got Right
Small, closed, and a known audience. Everything good about them follows from those three properties, and we copied all three without apology.
What They Get Badly Wrong
Photographs are compressed to nothing. There is no album, so a holiday becomes four hundred loose images. Search is unusable past a few weeks. And leaving means losing everything, so nobody leaves, which is not the same as being happy.
Structure Without Bureaucracy
A circle keeps the chat’s intimacy and adds the things a chat cannot have: albums that stay at original resolution, a history you can actually search, and an export that hands you everything in thirty seconds.
The Thing We Copied Most Carefully
Not having an audience. A circle never grows past the people invited into it, which is exactly why people write in it the way they write in a group chat.
