WhatsApp vs Telegram for Community Chats
Digital communication is an important part of any community. Those of us who lived in LEV for a while recognize that quite a bit of conversations take place inside various WhatsApp groups, possibly more than necessary, but that’s a topic for another day. The fact remains, it is critical to have a digital communication platform that is easy to use.
La EcoVilla(LEV) case study
LEV existed as a community for a number of years with 46 houses. The main LEV communal WA group is “LEV Buen Ride”, which consists of close to 200 people. Its a single group where many topics are covered on daily basis. The people inside the group are those currently living inside LEV, the owners, many of whom are living outside of Costa Rica as well as some members that “lived in LEV once, but have moved out, but still live in the area and so are kept on the list for nostalgic purposes”.
In addition to LEV Buen Ride, there exists close to 100, possibly more other independent WhatsApp groups with topics ranging from anything like “Men’s Circle” to “Meditation”, “Morning Workouts”, “Vaccines”, etc. Nobody actual has the complete list of these groups, there was an attempt to curate them in a spreadsheet at one point, however that attempt was a one time excercise and of course the data quickly became stale. You discover these other groups randomly as you talk to people or sometimes they’ll get promoted on the main chat and you’ll join them.
Needless to say that the “Lets have a separate WA group” for each topic is a failure, but not to blame anyone, that was the best thing they could do at the time and nobody had the energy to move this set-up to something better like WA Communities or Telegram which I’ll cover later.
Membership management on the main group is ad-hoc at best, with one of the owners once in a while(may be 2-3 times a year) goes in to remove renters that were just coming through.
There is a natural journey that most people go through when the come to LEV, they discover these WA groups, they get excited and join them, they quickly get overwhelmed, but they try to keep up, at some point they realize they are spending too much time keeping up with WA traffic and then start to disengage, with a number of people leaving even the main group, although they still reside in LEV. This is partly a technology problem and having a platform that is not easy to manage, partly a cultural problem where communication norms were never established, which results in poor communication practices on the existing groups.
A Better Alternative
In 2024, this is a problem that has been solved many times over with topic-based chats. If you’re familiar with platforms like Discord and Slack, you’ll know what that means, but many people are not and so that leaves WA and Telegram as the only viable alternatives which have mainstream adoption. Both offer some version of “topics”, but a closer look shows why WA is still very far behind.
WA Communities
In the last year or two, WA introduced the notion of Communities to solve the problem of “many groups”. Upon first look it’s a promising solution and allows for “grouping” of groups. Its a step in the right direction, but it falls short of standard topic-based platforms. Essentially the main construct in WA is still groups and the only thing they’ve done is added a thin layer that allows users to “group” their groups under a single “heading”.
You still need to join each group in order to see its content and you still do not see history of each group, you only see content once you joined a sub-group. You cannot search across multiple groups, etc. Basically the groups stayed as is, and the only thing that was added is a grouping. This helps people “discover” other groups and join them if they wish, but this is certainly not what most people would expect from a topic-based platform.
Machuca Valley chat which is a larger chat that encompasses Tacotal, LEV, Allegria, Maderal and eventually ESM was a single WA group that was migrated to WA Communities in the last 2 months. As a result a few sub-groups were created in addition to the “General Group”, but those other groups have membership that is much smaller. Meaning if there are about 200 people in the general chat, there are only 100 people in the “Events” chat. You can argue that means those 100 people are not interested in “Events”, but more likely explanation is people just haven’t joined the groups because of the extra step required to actually join each sub-topic and as a result we’re definitely loosing quite a bit of audience on various sub-topics.
And of course you can’t just “peek” inside a topic to see if its of interest to you because you have to join the group first and even when you join, you cannot scroll back.
The Machuca Valley migration use case shows that using WA Communities is a step up from single group, however it falls short of providing a proper topic-based platform.
Telegram
Telegram is a superior platform for both individual as well as group chats for many reasons.
Users’ phone number is hidden on the group chats which is a big advantage. I don’t want to share my phone number on WhatsApp when there are strangers on the group.
You can add exceptions for seeing the profile photo on Telegram, which is not available on WhatsApp.
Another advantage of using Telegram is being able to join in a Channel, which you don’t have such an opportunity on WhatsApp.
Telegram can be active on the desktop version without having the phone connected at the moment that you are using Telegram on a computer or laptop.
A single Telegram account can be logged in several devices which is really useful, but WhatsApp account will be logged out right after you log into a new device.
These are just a few, there are many more reasons why Telegram is superior which you can read here or here or here or countless of other articles you’ll find when you google “WhatsApp vs Telegram”. However the obvious big downside is the fact inside Costa Rica you’re going to be using WhatsApp no matter what as that is what everyone is using to communicate, so Telegram would be an “additional” platform.
For communities however, the biggest feature in Telegram is “topic-based chats”, Ability to have a single group, with single membership, and multiple topics underneath it that can be created and deleted as needed and where members can come into and out of the topic in order to “see it” as well as scroll back in history to see what has been covered and doing a single search throughout all topics.
These communal features are not just “nice to have”, they are what makes it a much better alternative to WA Communities and what reduces all the noise associated with traditional WA set-up where people come in and ask the same questions over and over and creation of new “topics” has a very high bar because you have to create a new WA group and ask people to join, etc.
Bottom Line
If we believe there is a reason to migrate back to WA, we need to articulate the trade-offs we are making. Yes WA has wider adoption and is the defacto platform of choice for messaging within Costa Rica, but that reason alone should not be why we migrate communal chat there and lose out on all the features I outline above.
I would really investigate and test first! any advantage we believe we would have if we migrate over.