Give Us The Floor: Group Chat

Broken

I had the app for a while and I loved it but I accidentally left my group chat and I sent a message to the support line. When they said they added me back it broke the app and said something was wrong with the string type. I tried deleting the app and reinstalling it and it was still broken.

Needs major improvements but seems not being updated

The app is a really cool idea, but unfortunately wasn’t executed well. I wish it had a bigger team/budget because it could’ve been good. The verification process is a bit of a pain, but understandable. However, I hate that you have to keep getting text notifications even after verifying with a phone number. There’s no way to turn them off. The layout is very bare bones. For some reason, the chat is cleared every couple days, making it very hard to keep conversations going unless the other person is checking in very regularly. This is probably the biggest detractor from the app. I’m currently looking to switch groups, as mine is very inactive. I only spoke to two people, and one barely said anything. They have a general resource page on the app with broken links. I told the team, maybe it’s been fixed by now. Same can be said for their YouTube channel, which seemed unmoderated, so I had to tell them about the hate comments being left on videos. Again, this might’ve been fixed by the time you’re reading this. They’re in a weird in between state when it comes to the amount of responsibility they place on users. One problem is the lack of activity. They tried to fix this by removing people after a few months of inactivity, but it didn’t work. I think they should either make those restrictions even tighter, or, better yet, let people freely see activity level and choose groups themselves. This way, active members can easily congregate. This is the way most social apps of this kind work. They seem to justify the choice of only allowing one very small group per person by saying it makes it more intimate/easy to moderate/similar to group therapy. But an online dynamic is just not the same, and they ended up failing on every end by trying to have their cake (a social app) and eat it too (a group therapy model). The current setup makes the app frustratingly restrictive, while STILL failing to do what they set out to do (make a close knit/active but safe community). Very disappointed here. I believe the app would be better if they leaned further into a normal social/communication app layout (think Discord or Amino), or just gave up and decided to make regular group therapy sessions. Traditional group therapy (that happens to be online) would allow them to stick to their vision/values while preventing the problems that have appeared. Activity wouldn’t be spread so thin because there’d be limited scheduled meetings. It wouldn’t allow them to serve as many people, but they are clearly lacking in demand anyway. I’m sorry to anyone working on this project who had high hopes for it, but the app ended up pretty nonfunctional, and it seems there’s no plans to fix it. I’m probably going to delete if my new group doesn’t work out.