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I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Blu

I find it interesting, that social media and messaging apps are kind of thrown into one pot increasingly. My mental model has always been like: - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon - Slack, Discord, Zulip, IRC - WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix - Zoom, Teams, Jitsi With mass communication to individual communication from top to bottom (and increasing freedom roughly from left to right). It seems these distinctions get blurred more and more and we will probably end up with different apps differing only in a single dimension from left to right.

flurdy 3y ago
With the addition of TikTok, Instagram, Shorts as the top row? And Email at the bottom?
outime 3y ago
I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).
- dezsiszabi 3y ago
  From these I barely heard about Bluesky and never used it. I have no clue about what Jitsi is, first time even reading this combination of letters :) The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...
  - boringg 3y ago
    Second this Jitsi is unknown to me. Bluesky I only heard about because they did marketing push with limited spots to drive demand and it got good press coverage being an investment/board seat of Jack
    - themoonisachees 3y ago
      Jitsi is a video calling platform (that you can self host also), it's mostly used for business-related video calls.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either: Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there. Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles. I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the - YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube category. To me, these are borderline social media and more akin to television - pure consumption, heavily discouraged participation. Just look at the comments on any of these for a proof. I'd give you Instagram, it seems immensely popular and intensively used as a communication platform. If we disregard our own bubbles and go strictly by popularity we should have considered WeChat and Douyin too, I guess.
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    > Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? I can't say overall, but my children and their friends use snap as their first line of communication, with iMessage a close second.
  - chadd 3y ago
    Great point about disregarding our own bubbles. Here's a good example re:Snapchat. Slightly more than 5% of the world is on Snapchat daily. That number has been going up, almost without fail, quarter over quarter for 12 years.
  - dagw 3y ago
    Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  IRC is not a website. Speaks a lot as to the changing sands of time.
  - dagw 3y ago
    IRC is not a website. Neither is WhatApp, Discord, Slack and many of the other ones mentioned (yes you can interact with them via a website, but the same is true for IRC)
  - outime 3y ago
    Yeah, you're right, even though we could say the same about Signal and others. In my defense, I know [1] very well - it's not a website! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796
- ziddoap 3y ago
  Edit: I was wrong, 40M MAU is peanuts and shouldn't even be considered an app really.
  - echelon_musk 3y ago
    It is absolutely barely used. I say this as someone who used it exclusively for 5+ years before giving up and using WhatsApp. There is hardly even a comparison between Signal and WhatsApp. Downloads != users.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - outime 3y ago
    Compared to the other examples, it's rarely used. For instance, Messenger has 3B MAU whereas Signal has 40M, which is just a bit over 1% of Messenger's user base, yet Messenger wasn't mentioned in OP among others which is my point.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - lee-rhapsody 3y ago
    Seems like you're splitting hairs. His point was that some of these services popular with the HN crowd aren't as popular elsewhere. And Signal has historically had a reputation of being used primarily by techies, not the general masses (even if the current numbers indicate that's shifted).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
strogonoff 3y ago
Have to say, this is not a bad way to break down today’s social media/messaging along two axes.
williamcotton 3y ago
I like this, and I think there’s a third axis if we want to include many-to-many moving towards the one-to-many of prior electric media. Something something broadcast AM radio, something something HAM radio…
ihaveajob 3y ago
I have a similar mental model, but Teams the way we use it is more of a replacement of Slack than Zoom. It's a huge app in terms of features, and it covers both segments, so it's not really a clean divide there.
- gryn 3y ago
  True, the problem with it though is that it kinda half ass everything, and the design for it is kinda mediocre. The only reason it's so ubiquitous is the office/outlook bundling sold to most companies. It a chimera that's the outcome of multiple grafting procedures And no matter how much makeup it still show when you use it long enough.
  - ihaveajob 3y ago
    It's also a very powerful "office OS" type of platform. Nobody else comes near in that dimension AFAIK. Agreed that it's not a designer's wet dream, but it does the job, albeit in a clunky way.
pixelmonkey 3y ago
I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed. As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are: A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar) B) direct and group messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp) C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram) D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor) E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber) When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B. I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development. Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here: https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit
- naravara 3y ago
  > D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor) I sort of struggle to think of the utility of these being installed apps. I feel like just doing a better job of designing web pages to run on mobile would be fine for booking a hotel. Notifications and location tracking is all you’d be missing, but that’s not THAT big of a deal. Those are both doable with PWAs now, and even before they were you could have just done it through email or SMS if you really had to. There’s a lot of stuff where I just don’t feel like it needs to be an app and would be better off just a service that runs through a well designed website.
  - pixelmonkey 3y ago
    Yea, I agree. Part of the reason I used "episodic" as a category was to uninstall 100% of my episodic apps and only reinstall when/if needed.
gryn 3y ago
Funny that you separate slack and Teams in my head they kinda sit close. I worked inside different teams & companies that used in different ways for some with the spaces it was more like a wiki in other places exclusively something like zoom, in my current team it's slack+zoom but to communicate with the non-engineering people of the company.

flurdy 3y ago

With the addition of TikTok, Instagram, Shorts as the top row? And Email at the bottom?

outime 3y ago

I find it funny that if I were to read your comment outside of this website, I could most likely identify it as a HN comment because it mentions barely-used sites popular in HN (such as Bluesky, Signal, Jitsi, IRC, etc), but skips mentioning actually popular ones everywhere else (like Snapchat, Facebook/Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, etc).

dezsiszabi 3y ago
From these I barely heard about Bluesky and never used it. I have no clue about what Jitsi is, first time even reading this combination of letters :) The rest I know. And I do read Hacker News...
- boringg 3y ago
  Second this Jitsi is unknown to me. Bluesky I only heard about because they did marketing push with limited spots to drive demand and it got good press coverage being an investment/board seat of Jack
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    Jitsi is a video calling platform (that you can self host also), it's mostly used for business-related video calls.
weinzierl 3y ago
Oh, I agree so much, but I am not sure about your examples either: Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It had its time, but personally I don't know anyone still there. Same with Facebook Messenger, which has completely been replaced by WhatsApp in my (non-nerd) circles. I thought about including TikTok but it would be more in the - YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, PeerTube category. To me, these are borderline social media and more akin to television - pure consumption, heavily discouraged participation. Just look at the comments on any of these for a proof. I'd give you Instagram, it seems immensely popular and intensively used as a communication platform. If we disregard our own bubbles and go strictly by popularity we should have considered WeChat and Douyin too, I guess.
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  > Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? I can't say overall, but my children and their friends use snap as their first line of communication, with iMessage a close second.
- chadd 3y ago
  Great point about disregarding our own bubbles. Here's a good example re:Snapchat. Slightly more than 5% of the world is on Snapchat daily. That number has been going up, almost without fail, quarter over quarter for 12 years.
- dagw 3y ago
  Snapchat - does it even exist anymore? It's the primary mode of group communication for my teenage daughter and everybody in her social circles. Second place is probably Discord, but that is heavily skewer towards people she knows via gaming.
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    That is interesting. I have a teenage daughter too and never heard Snapchat mentioned. Some of here friends are on TikTok though, but we don't allow it. Communication is mostly iMessage, old fashioned phone calls and the MS Teams provided by her school.
Dalewyn 3y ago
IRC is not a website. Speaks a lot as to the changing sands of time.
- dagw 3y ago
  IRC is not a website. Neither is WhatApp, Discord, Slack and many of the other ones mentioned (yes you can interact with them via a website, but the same is true for IRC)
- outime 3y ago
  Yeah, you're right, even though we could say the same about Signal and others. In my defense, I know [1] very well - it's not a website! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796
ziddoap 3y ago
Edit: I was wrong, 40M MAU is peanuts and shouldn't even be considered an app really.
- echelon_musk 3y ago
  It is absolutely barely used. I say this as someone who used it exclusively for 5+ years before giving up and using WhatsApp. There is hardly even a comparison between Signal and WhatsApp. Downloads != users.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- outime 3y ago
  Compared to the other examples, it's rarely used. For instance, Messenger has 3B MAU whereas Signal has 40M, which is just a bit over 1% of Messenger's user base, yet Messenger wasn't mentioned in OP among others which is my point.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- lee-rhapsody 3y ago
  Seems like you're splitting hairs. His point was that some of these services popular with the HN crowd aren't as popular elsewhere. And Signal has historically had a reputation of being used primarily by techies, not the general masses (even if the current numbers indicate that's shifted).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

strogonoff 3y ago

Have to say, this is not a bad way to break down today’s social media/messaging along two axes.

williamcotton 3y ago

I like this, and I think there’s a third axis if we want to include many-to-many moving towards the one-to-many of prior electric media. Something something broadcast AM radio, something something HAM radio…

ihaveajob 3y ago

I have a similar mental model, but Teams the way we use it is more of a replacement of Slack than Zoom. It's a huge app in terms of features, and it covers both segments, so it's not really a clean divide there.

gryn 3y ago
True, the problem with it though is that it kinda half ass everything, and the design for it is kinda mediocre. The only reason it's so ubiquitous is the office/outlook bundling sold to most companies. It a chimera that's the outcome of multiple grafting procedures And no matter how much makeup it still show when you use it long enough.
- ihaveajob 3y ago
  It's also a very powerful "office OS" type of platform. Nobody else comes near in that dimension AFAIK. Agreed that it's not a designer's wet dream, but it does the job, albeit in a clunky way.

pixelmonkey 3y ago

I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed. As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are: A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar) B) direct and group messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp) C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram) D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor) E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber) When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B. I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development. Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here: https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit

naravara 3y ago
> D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor) I sort of struggle to think of the utility of these being installed apps. I feel like just doing a better job of designing web pages to run on mobile would be fine for booking a hotel. Notifications and location tracking is all you’d be missing, but that’s not THAT big of a deal. Those are both doable with PWAs now, and even before they were you could have just done it through email or SMS if you really had to. There’s a lot of stuff where I just don’t feel like it needs to be an app and would be better off just a service that runs through a well designed website.
- pixelmonkey 3y ago
  Yea, I agree. Part of the reason I used "episodic" as a category was to uninstall 100% of my episodic apps and only reinstall when/if needed.

gryn 3y ago

Funny that you separate slack and Teams in my head they kinda sit close. I worked inside different teams & companies that used in different ways for some with the spaces it was more like a wiki in other places exclusively something like zoom, in my current team it's slack+zoom but to communicate with the non-engineering people of the company.