Best way to share links with friends?

August 13, 2018 10:22 AM

Some friends and I share a lot of links/reading recommendations with each other. Currently we do this in a group messaging thread, but it's non-ideal in a lot of ways. Mostly because 1) other conversation gets clogged/disjointed by the intrusion of links, 2) a link can quickly get buried if it's shared and then something else is discussed, and 3) it is very tedious/sometimes impossible to go back and find links that have been shared a long time ago. What's the best way to do this outside of our text thread?

Desired functionality:
-Easy both to share and read from both phone and computer
-Private
-Easy-to-browse archive
-This is nebulous, but ideally it should be pretty easy to follow - like giving some kind of message-type notification when someone shares something - so not, eg, a

Suggestions?

posted by pdq to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

My friends and I now have a Discord server for our group chat, with one channel for main chat stuff but separate channels for some types of content, like one for sharing pictures and a separate one for anything NSFW that can be muted when actually at work.
posted by Sequence at 10:27 AM on August 13, 2018

+ 1 for Discord.
posted by spatula at 10:28 AM on August 13, 2018

My friends and I use Slack for our group chat.
posted by Jacob G at 10:38 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Pocket allows you to share links with friends, including notifications.
posted by Happy Dave at 10:49 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Email.
posted by booooooze at 11:02 AM on August 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Seconding Jacob G's suggestion for Slack (although from my limited experience Discord also seems very similar). Slack allows you to have separate channels for various topics, you can word search across all channels (though there is some time-limit on the archiving for non-business users), each user can adjust what type of notifications they receive, etc.
posted by wuzandfuzz at 11:07 AM on August 13, 2018

I've used a private subreddit for exactly this purpose. I didn't need notifications so I can't say how easy or possible it is to set them up, but an internet search suggests that a few apps exist for subreddit alerts.
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 11:15 AM on August 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

I second Discord.
posted by rollick at 11:27 AM on August 13, 2018

I use Slack with a group of friends and it's so great at organizing communication I wish I could get everybody in my life to use it.
posted by General Malaise at 11:28 AM on August 13, 2018

email or how about a google doc/sheet? You could still post the link in the group chat but also post it in the sheet so that you can keep an archive of it.
posted by dawkins_7 at 12:31 PM on August 13, 2018

I think email is perfect for this, mostly because gmail has great search functionality so you can go back and find old stuff. For some reason some people really hate email, though.
posted by mai at 12:42 PM on August 13, 2018

I mean all of the above are fine and will work but so will a private Facebook group if you're all already there.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:10 PM on August 13, 2018

Came here to say private Facebook group as well, which is what my friends and I use. A person shares a link as a post in the group, and discussions happen as comments on the post. Posts stay there forever so there's no losing track if someone wants to come back to it later; you can turn on notifications for the group so you get notified when someone posts; you can also turn on notifications for a particular post as an individual, if you haven't commented but want to keep up to date on a discussion on one post; you can access it from your phone or computer; a private group is unsearchable/unviewable except by those who are members or invited to join by a member/admin (and you can lock it down so that only admins can invite members).
posted by jouir at 3:02 PM on August 13, 2018

The latest version of Skype has this as one of its features. In any conversation (individual or group), you can click the "Gallery" button toward the top of the window and it'll show you everything that wasn't a simple message, and you can additionally filter it to show just Media, Links, or Files.
posted by one for the books at 2:55 PM on August 14, 2018