Wavelength is a new app built specifically for group chats. This isn’t something that would typically be on my radar except that, in this case, John Gruber is an advisor of theirs.
Gruber is opinionated, picky, hypercritical, and, crucially, has a great design sense — particularly when it comes to Apple platforms. That was enough to convince me to give it a try.
Messages, Signal, WhatsApp, and their cohorts all share the same fundamental two-level design: a list of chats, and a single thread of a messages within each chat. This is the obvious and correct design for a messaging app whose primary focus is one-on-one personal chats. Group chats, in these apps, work best the closer they are in membership to one-on-one.
Wavelength is different because it’s group-first. This manifests conceptually by adding a third, middle level to the design: threads. At the root level of Wavelength are groups. Groups have an owner, and members. At the second level are threads. Inside threads, of course, are the actual messages.
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While Wavelength itself is not a social network, it’s a platform that lets you create your own private micro social networks in the form of groups…
You only join groups that interest you. You only pay attention to threads within the group that interest you. The result feels natural and profoundly efficient in terms of your attention and time.
My initial impression—after using Wavelength for the past couple of days—is that it has tremendous potential, the UI and UX are great, but it is still missing a few affordances I have come to expect from similar apps
My biggest gripe is that there is no built-in discovery mechanism for public groups. To help rectify that, here are invite links to a few groups I’ve joined: Gardening, Apple, Hacker News, and AI.