What Happened to Instant Messengers?

Question

These days we're all on services that more or less look/act the same, whether it be IRCCloud, Discord, Slack, etc. We no longer run a little program with a simple list of people you could message directly or put into groups.My question is, is this a social phenomenon, or is the grouped chats UI paradigm objectively superior than the buddylist model?Is that UI paradigm dead, if so, why do phone UI's still use the buddylist->conversation UI model?Is it because we moved from one-to-one to one-to-many? If so, why didn't chat rooms kill the Instant Messenger UI in its infancy?

Comevius · Accepted Answer

Smartphones and social media happened, they killed MSN Messenger. It was replaced by messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Discord for gaming. Slack for work. You have to specialize these days to make it. Telegram for example made it by pretending to be more secure. Signal made it by actually being more secure.

sen · Answer

A lot of my family/friends use Telegram, it's about as close to old-school IMs as you can get these days. I like it, but I spend most my time on Discord as I prefer the IRC-style "browse servers and channels" idea.

night-rider · Answer

You could try combining them all into a single app: https://tryshift.com/

Overtonwindow · Answer

What you seek is already here. Greater functionality is not a bad thing here. I&rsquo;d rather have Discord than go back to AIM