Messages and chat distinction confusion

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Don’t have anything to add, just that there are discussions about the chat/posts distinctions:

Now I've got Chat what do I do with Personal Messages?

I love Discourse Chat - it is thoroughly polished and gives a brilliant experience for ephemeral communications within an online forum in ways we could only dream of last year. However, I’m stuck with a bit of a problem. After a few years of nudging folk to use personal messages (PMs) as a never-very-satisfactory alternative to chat, what do I do with them? Group comms are also usually fine as a chat channel. And as you need a category to anchor that anyway, there is an obvious place for persi…

Chat vs Messages

Forgive my silly questions - we’re in the process of upgrading our very old (pre-Chat-as-Core) install to the latest version. We’re trying to figure out if we want to activate Chat. What’s the difference/pros-cons between Chat and Messages? We have turned off ‘Enable public channels based on categories.’ yet the Chat popup defaults to the ‘Channels’ tab rather than DMs - is there a way to hide the Channels tab? Is there a way to migrate Messages into Chats/DMs so communications are all …

And valuable quotes from the team:

In 2022,

@awesomerobot

The distinction between the two types of functionality is rather thin from my perspective, and probably non-existent for most users.

@awesomerobot

There’s not much to stop me from writing paragraphs in chat (and I frequently do!) and nothing stops people from sending me chats asynchronously.

In 2024,

@HAWK

I don’t think they will ever be merged – they serve very different purposes. Chat is ephemeral and is used to have quick discussions with people. PMs are permanent and are therefore used for private discussions that may need to be revisited in the future.

I agree that for many communities, chat simply isn’t necessary and can be turned off. For others (like internal communities) it is important.