Threaded Group Chat App
October 6, 2020 7:41 AM   Subscribe

Me and a couple of my 40 something buddies have been keeping in touch via GroupMe. While it's better than the group text that we were previously using it's still lacking some features that we'd like. The biggest one is threaded conversations, are you aware of any instant messaging app that allows you to go back and reply to a specific message in the conversation stream?
posted by jmsta to Technology (11 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
It might be overkill, but Slack works pretty well for this.
posted by eponym at 7:42 AM on October 6, 2020 [10 favorites]


WhatsApp has this feature.
posted by mekily at 7:43 AM on October 6, 2020


WhatsApp allows for responses to specific messages.
posted by wicked_sassy at 7:43 AM on October 6, 2020


iMessage allows this in iOS 14.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:50 AM on October 6, 2020 [2 favorites]


Wire will. Long press on a message, and tap reply.

Also, Discord could be used for this too.
posted by deezil at 7:53 AM on October 6, 2020


If you press and hold on a WhatsApp message, it highlights it and some more buttons appear at the top right - the left most one is "Reply", which basically quotes the original message in your new message. It's not exactly "threaded conversations", but it lets you have a couple of conversations going on at once. Otherwise, Slack has both different channels and threaded conversations within a channel.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 7:53 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm not aware of any IM app that does "threaded" like a web forum, but my friends and I have mostly switched to Telegram and it does replies, quotes, and forwards. We tried Discord but even for a bunch of tech inclined people that was way overkill - Discord is kinda like Slack for gamers.

Telegram strikes a good balance between simplicity & tons of features. Also it's not owned by Facebook, unlike WhatsApp.
posted by bradbane at 9:59 AM on October 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


Keybase lets you reply to an individual message in a chat. When you do, the new message still appears at the bottom of the chat window but it includes the message you're replying to as quoted text, with bar to the left to mark it as such. Clicking on the quote takes you back to the quoted message (which might also contain its own quote) so you can easily click back through the history of a reply-to-replies thread.

You can also create "channels" inside a team chat to break it out into separate conversations, if you want. And the team membership/invite/privacy/privileges stuff is all pretty well thought out.

End-to-end encrypted, very smooth multiple-device support. Client (though not server) is open source. Currently owned by Zoom.
posted by flabdablet at 11:55 AM on October 6, 2020


Came in to suggest slack -- I have a friend group that uses it, and the rooms plus the threading give you lots of options. Age range of users: early-30s to mid-40s.
posted by chiefthe at 12:01 PM on October 6, 2020


Zoom has threaded chat replies too.
posted by eyeball at 8:20 PM on October 6, 2020


Discord does not have threaded replies, FYI. It is the only way in which Slack is superior.
posted by brook horse at 8:59 PM on October 6, 2020


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