Group chat without WhatsApp — and without giving out your number

The number problem

A WhatsApp group shows every member's number to every other member. For a family group that is a non-issue. For a college fest committee, a resale deal, a tuition batch, or a landlord and six tenants, it is a real one — and it is not solvable inside WhatsApp, because the number is the account.

A room reached by a link has no such requirement. People join with a display name. Nobody learns anything about anybody that they were not told directly.

The adding problem

Adding twenty people to a WhatsApp group means having twenty numbers saved, or collecting them, and then adding people one at a time as stragglers appear. An invite link solves part of that and still ties membership to a phone number.

Here the link is the room. You paste it once. Whoever needs to be there opens it. Somebody who joins late opens the same link.

What you give up, honestly

WhatsApp is on everybody's phone already, and it has end-to-end encryption. Neither is true here: this runs in a browser, and messages in a room are readable by the service. If your conversation needs end-to-end encryption, use something that offers it — that is a real limitation and not one worth talking around.

What you get instead is a group that costs nobody an account, nobody a number and nobody an install, and one you can hand to a stranger without handing them anything else.

When to use which

Keep WhatsApp for the groups that are really your contacts: family, close friends, the people you would call. Use a link room for the groups that are really a purpose — an event, a batch, a committee, a one-off — where the membership is defined by the thing rather than by who has whose number.

Questions people ask