My wife has formed a political action group that has grown from 12 to over 200 since the new year. We started out using Signal to create message threads in various categories, but these are now proving to be impractical: the number of new posts is overwhelming, and new members signing on can’t look back at messages from before they joined.
We don’t need a full blown message board like Discourse, but something that will perform a similar function to allow our members to have conversations with each other in a manageable way.
I have suggested Groups.io, which my alumni group uses, and I think it would work okay, but since I’m not familiar with many other such platforms, I’m asking for your advice.
Signal is about as secure as it gets. If for some reason you needed to protect against certain government agencies peeking at your communications you should stay on that platform.
We naturally have some concern about that, but Signal just isn’t working for us. Which is why we might have to settle for less security and more practicality.
Bluesky is exactly like Twitter. It’s not a messaging platform.
I’m pretty sure that Telegram will let new joiners see the entire contents of an existing chat, if the group administrator allows it.
Pumble is almost exactly like Slack, but it’s free. It’s good for organizing chats into different categories, all on one “site” (unlike Telegram, where all the chats are intermingled with any other unrelated chats)
Unless it’s just one-way communication, emails get difficult to follow for actual chats, in my opinion. If it is just sending info out, I agree that a mailing list would be fine.
Give Pumble a try. We have one for our family, and there are different channels: General, Wordle, Media, etc. Each one is a separate conversation, and that family set-up is completely separated from any other Pumble sites you might have.
Telegram is just like Signal, but apparently the group admin can allow new joiners to see the whole historical chat, so that might look more familiar.
I’m currently checking out the GroupSpot app (www.groupspot.app) as a possibility for political organizing. It seems that most people use it for coordinating sports teams and most reviews are very positive for that application. Not clear to me yet whether is has possibilities for political organizing with trusted participants. Anyone have any experience with the GroupSpot app?
It’s open-source and you can either use their cloud version (free with unlimited users but with limited search history) or self-host it with no limitations. It is not end to end encrypted though. In my opinion, that is a good thing, since with 200+ online members, it’s a good chance you can never really secure the group. Better not to provide a false sense of privacy. Members should not be discussing sensitive things online anywhere if they are concerned about state eavesdropping.
Matrix may be a more secure option, but might be too confusing for non techies: https://matrix.org/
And I really don’t think you can guarantee that all 200+ people are trustworthy. Giving them that false sense of privacy might lead to situations where they self-incriminate; a lot of activist groups get infiltrated and monitored from the inside.
What features do you need? Do you just want text-based threads? Or do you want to host online meetings with voice and/or video? Private messaging? Auto-moderation? Do you want the group to be discoverable? etc…
Text-based threads, and PMs. We use Zoom, so we don’t need a separate internal voice/video capability. The group will be private.
I think with the previously recommended Pumble (much more capability than we really need), Zulip (workable and less of a learning curve), and Groups.io (just about right, but sadly not free for our number of members), we have enough options for now. I’ve set up test accounts in these three and will discuss them with our exec committee, so we can pick one.
How about Discord? You can set up different channels for different topics. New members can read everything old. PMs are possible between members in one “server” (your group)
I’m following this thread with some interest. I belong to a hobby group with over 600 members (probably a much smaller number are active) which currently uses mainly a Facebook group to communicate meeting information and have (brief) discussions. Some folks want to move to another platform, but there is no agreement about which one. I don’t think anyone wants to have long discussions, there are larger and better forums in the hobby for that. But it would be nice to have a distinct space to buy/sell/trade hobby items as well.
No, it’s just a hosted chat app. You as a “server” owner can administer it and create channels and such, but it’s still running entirely on their cloud. Their terminology is confusing, but you don’t have to host anything yourself.
Many gaming groups and younger people use it.
I personally kinda hate it because it reuses usernames and accounts across all of someone’s different Discord servers. So if I join a gaming one and a family one and your new political one, my identity is shared between all of them. It’s both confusing for the other people (who might see your gaming username) and also a potential doxxing concern. You can set per-server usernames but that’s even more confusing because when someone DMs you, they see your global username instead of your server one.
That, and it’s incredibly spammy and disruptive and full of ads and animations.
It’s the young hip version of Slack, for better or worse. Personally I think it has the worst user experience of any chat app, but I’m just an old fart.