As far as I understand, Discord and WhatsApp, with maybe Slack still a thing in that space and maybe Zulip doing a decent job at eking out an open source alternative.

And from what I’ve seen, it’s a cool way to do online social media. I happened upon a Discord recently run by and for some people I was loosely in contact with online, and going in and saying hi and having and seeing some conversations, after being exclusively on the fedi for a while, opened my eyes to why it was such a thing … compared to the feed generating focus of reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube style big social platforms … it is truly SOCIAL media as it emphasises the creation of and interaction amongst an actual social group, not open ended public blog posting for the whole world to read and interact with. It also emphasises conversations, rather than “posts”.

From what I’ve gathered it is likely the phenomenon that is the Fediverse’s blindspot … the “new” form of social media that is growing in place of or supplementary to big social … that is making a better form of online social interaction without trying to “merely” modify the designs of big-social (where, let’s be real, even decentralisation is really a modification more focused on ownership than the form of social media).

The article talks about DMs on those platforms, but mainly focussed on Instagram

Nostr