Many people say that the real twitter (now ๐•) happens in group chats. The goal of the platform is to become a good enough poster that you get invited to the good group chats, and from there to be a good enough group chat poster that you get invited to the real group chats.

For all that, group chats (henceforth GCs) are half-baked on the best of days.

Here's a brief, non-comprehensive overview of their problems:

History doesn't load reliably

When you see you have a new message, you click into the chat, only to find that it didn't load at the last read message (or, didn't mark the dividing line), and so you need to scroll back to find that point, or to regain context.

As often as not, when you scroll back, as past messages load, the leading cursor ("the present") will get mis-placed, erasing more recent messages from view. You have to exit the chat and re-open it to re-load them.

Also, when scrolling back (this is harder to notice), some blocks of messages don't load reliably, so you will see a "jump" in the chat as you scroll back, where chunks of events (messages, reacts) will not be present that you know were sent.

It is impossible to tell who is in the chat

Searching the GC for users isn't even a feature. GCs used to be capped at something like 75 users; presently the cap is closer to 255. If you want to know if someone is in the chat, the fastest ways to tell are

  1. Ask the chat if so-and-so is in there
  2. scroll the entire membership list
  3. DM the person directly and ask them if they're part of the chat ???

I refer to this as "like being at a party in a dark room."

I have seen instances where the chat owner themselves has to ask the chat "is so-and-so in here?"

No feature parity across platforms

On iOS, you can edit sent messages; you cannot on web. (I don't know what else is missing, but there aren't a tremendous number of features, so...)

All channel events bear the same weight

I don't care if a user added a react to a message; I don't need to re-read the chat to see reacts if that's the only delta that has occurred since the last time I caught up. Yet they're given the same priority as messages, with no way to turn off notifications for reacts only.

Responses only jump to history if it's in scrollback

When someone responds to a message, that response includes a small quoted version of the original. There are actually multiple issues here:

  1. if the original message was very long, the entire body is shown again (and again, and again) in the chat history
  2. You can tap on the quoted block to jump to the previous message to get additional context, but only if that message is already loaded into scrollback (that is, into your device's memory). So, a common strategy is to scroll up randomly until a bunch of pages have loaded, scroll down to the response, and tap the quote to see where it leads.
  3. Responses to tweet posts show a preview of the tweet, but tapping the quoted tweet doesn't actually bring the tweet up. You have to go through the same process as in the previous point (scroll up, scroll down, tap the quote) to find the original tweet.

Search is laughably bad

You can't restrict search by GC, and any search that goes past a certain time period (it feels like a month, but it may be based on the number of messages sent or some server-side timeout) simply doesn't work.

Searching chats can resurrect the dead

If a search hit includes a chat whose counter-party deleted their account, the dead chat is brought back into your timeline for the duration of the session or until the memory is freed, without giving any indication of who the chat was with.

Dead chats are otherwise excluded from your history.

Starting a new DM, even with max permissions, is an invitation to suspension

Because of the number of bots on the platform and the prevalence of DM/GC spam, starting a new chat with other users is fraught with peril. Things that can get you in trouble:

  • messaging someone you don't have a strong relationship with
  • including a link in your first message (e.g. "I saw this post of yours and wanted to talk about it")
  • including anything other than text in your first message
  • including anything other than text in any your early messages, until they reply
  • messaging your mutuals, for some reason

It's so perilous that I think long and hard before I DM anyone, wondering "is this the one that's going to get my account frozen?" Which is not a great thought to be having when I've put so much of myself into this platform over the years.

The product I hate most that I still use

The way GCs work, it's almost like ๐• has forgotten that they exist, or don't view them as a critical part of what makes the platform sticky for many of the key users of the platform.