OpenCHAT-OC

Introduction

In our roadmap we introduce the idea of Communities. We hope you will agree that this is an important and exciting evolution of OpenChat. In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into the feature and explain what it’s all about.

When we began the development of OpenChat we had in mind something along the lines of WhatsApp or Signal. One very important difference was the support for public groups. We initially underestimated the significance of this feature. It took OpenChat out of the realms of a chat tool used largely between small groups of friends and family, and closer to the territory of communication platforms like Discord or Slack.

We noticed that large public groups started to emerge revolving around certain communities of users that shared some commonality. That commonality could be anything: perhaps they all use the same language, or they all relate to a particular area of interest, or they all relate to a particular project. In this sense, these informal communities are a bit like Discord servers.

Furthermore, a community may wish to restict and control its membership creating private communities. We see this as an important step for the future monetization of OpenChat as it enables us to easily support its use as an internal communication tool within a corporate setting. In that sense, communities can also be thought of like Slack workspaces.

The problem

Public groups are great for communities up to a point, but as the community grows we notice that the groups become unfocused. This in turn makes them difficult for the owners and admins to moderate. And this in turn tends to reduce the quality of the discourse in the groups.

If a community leader wishes to address this at the moment they might choose to create multiple groups with more targeted topics. But then nothing binds these groups together, nothing unites their members, and there is no tooling that helps us see these groups as part of a larger whole.

What’s missing is another level in the hierarchy and that is what we are calling Communities.

Navigation

Essentially, this will just be another organisational layer above the existing level of groups. Let’s try to visualise this with some proposed designs. Keep in mind that these designs are provisional and represent our current thinking. Things can and no doubt will change.