Group Chats Should Explode When the Party’s Over
Group chats are broken. Everyone's adding me to them, that's why I hate them.
Group chats today are like getting married on a first date. It's a lifetime commitment that I have no idea if I want to be a part of.
If we think about group chats today as a dinner party, it basically means the party doesn't exist.
My personal belief is that 90% of chats don't exist today because the friction of popping up a convo with a new person or group is way too high.
Every messenger today starts with a "contact." Literally, the first question every On The Record messaging app asks me is "what's your phone number?"
When's the last time at a party you walked up to someone and the first thing out of your mouth was "Hey, what's your phone number?" Never. That's where we are with messaging today.
New relationships don't start with contact info, they start with a conversation.
I wanna be able to pop up new groups instantly, with whoever I'm with, and explode it when those groups are done. And if I like someone, I can choose to add my real name, not explode it, and keep that person around forever.
If you think of group chat as a big dinner party, the way messaging works today is basically two parts. The worst part and the best part. And both suck.
It's starts with a huge group before the event, someone adds everyone in it, no one has the other people's numbers, and it's a nightmare. It's the group organizer's dream and everyone else's nightmare. One person blows up everyone's phones, shares everyone's contact info without asking, and then we spend our entire time asking "who's 615?" "who's 309?" and then watching as "615 left the group chat."
The other part is the very end of the night, when there are only 6 people left, and we all want to stay in touch. It takes 10 minutes to get everyone's phone number, add contacts, ask a friend to connect us, but hopefully we made it work because this is the group we want to stay connected to.
If a dinner party were just a group chat, we are missing the entire party.
How we pop into different Convos, meet different people, decide how we show up in each different group, have different conversations, and invite others to come meet someone we want you to meet. We have no way to pop into different side chats and, most importantly, leave when it's not for us.
We haven't had the Snapchat moment for group chats, yet.
That was the moment in social when everyone posting photos with filters discovered that 10000x usage lived inside the disappearing story. The more raw, more real, more ephemeral.
When things don't last forever, a lot more people share. When things disappear, a lot more people come back to see them before they disappear.
Group chats today are like getting married on a first date. It's a lifetime commitment that I have no idea if I want to be a part of. There's no way to try about a group without fear of it lasting forever. New use cases live in impermanence, not forever. It's always counter-intuitive to think more usage lives in the space where things go away. In the past it's only been content disappearing, but now it's also relationships.
Relationships in real life are fluid. People come and go. But online? Nothing ever really leaves. Social networks turned every connection into something permanent. Even if the photo disappears, the identity stays. Even if the post goes away, the relationship thread remains.
Snapchat and Instagram stories vanish, but the person doesn’t.
That’s the last frontier: not disappearing content, but disappearing networks.
When Snapchat first blew up, I remember smart people asking, “If the content disappears, why will people come back?”
It was a fair question, if you assumed people were coming back for the content.
But look deeper.
People weren’t returning for the photos.
They were returning for the feeling.
The freedom. The safety. The momentary space where nothing followed them around.
Stories weren’t successful in spite of disappearing. They were successful because disappearing created a safe space.
Group chats don’t feel like that today. Even encrypted ones.
They feel permanent—names, histories, receipts, screenshots, all hanging in the air. Nothing feels off the record. Nothing feels safe.
If disappearing content was the last phase of the internet, disappearing networks are the next phase.
Think about why people say they “hate social media” or why it feels like the internet is tearing us apart.
Maybe it’s not the algorithms.
Maybe it’s not the politics.
Maybe it’s simply this: We can never disconnect from our past.
Everyone we’ve ever known is still there.
Every connection persists forever, whether it nourishes us or drains us.
What if humans were never meant to carry thousands of relationships at once?
What if this forced-permanence is great for platforms, and terrible for people?
We’ve always asked the wrong question.
Not: “If my network disappears, why would I come back?”
But: “Why would I want to come back to a place where everyone I’ve ever known is waiting for me?”
What if logging in didn’t mean facing the entire cast of your life?
What if there was a place where only the people you wanted were present—no history, no noise, no ghosts of every past connection?
A place where you didn’t feel angry or anxious the moment you opened it?
We assumed people came back because their whole network was there.
But the truth is: everyone being there is the problem.
Content didn’t need to last forever.
Relationships don’t either.
The giant social networks of today will feel like phone books tomorrow—big listings of everyone, useful for no one.
I don’t want a space where everyone is there.
I want a space where somebody is there.
That’s the new safe space.
Not the place where you connect to the world... but the place where you can finally get away from it.
The experience of group chats is about to change forever, and the largest use case on the internet is about to become much larger...
I deeply believe that because this paradigm doesn't exist for our group chats, 90% of groups in the future don't actually exist yet today.
Just like 90% of content wasn't being shared because sharing to our profile forever is not what people wanted to do every day. Before this moment happens, we don't think we actually want more of it. The reality is, we don't want more of the same. Polished, perfect, filtered photos. We want more of the real. The raw, intimate, more vulnerable stuff that people were scared to share. We had to change the foundation to unlock the stuff that was actually way more interesting. This moment hasn't happened yet for chat. And the fear of screenshots is bigger than we think.
People don't believe they want more group chats. I think the reality is that people don't want more group chats that last forever.
We are exhausted.
New groups, new networks, new relationships, and new experiences should be able to pop up, happen, and expire. It should also protect me from the most powerful and popular communication medium of today, screenshots, and the friend recording my screen. Protect me from the screenshot. Not by fighting it, by making it irrelevant. In today's world, we can't block the screen recording. We have to just assume everything is being recorded and allow people to change how they show up.
Real life is off the record. Convos is the closest thing we have to real life.
If more groups don't last forever, I'll join a lot more groups and actually end up with a lot more relationships that I do want to last forever. And maybe those relationships graduate to the On The Record forever networks. Or not.
But we need a new safe space where the expectation isn't that I meet you randomly and then see you the rest of my life.
In the past, they just never happened because there was no way to strike up a conversation at the party. We need a new foundation and paradigm for communication.
The cool thing is that it's here today with Convos Messenger, the world's first Off The Record Messenger. Send me a Convo Code on any On The Record messaging app (iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, X, Instagram) if you wanna chat. No one can reach you on Convos, it's your space protected from everyone.
We can explode it when it's done. Burns the keys on everyone's devices, the party's over. Read more about Explode here.
