Glossary
Group Chat
Group chat is a messaging conversation that includes three or more participants in a shared room, where every member can read and reply to all messages in real time.
General definition
Group chat is the foundational multi-party messaging pattern. Unlike a direct message, which is private between two users, a group chat room is shared among all its members. Messages are delivered to every participant, and the history is visible to anyone who joins.
- Named rooms or channels with persistent message history
- Membership controls (invite, remove, mute) managed by an owner or admin
- Typing indicators and read receipts visible across all members
- Support for file sharing, reactions and threaded replies
Group chats are used for team communication, community forums, customer support queues, patient care teams and any scenario where multiple people need a shared messaging space. The maximum room size, message retention period and moderation controls vary by platform implementation.
In the Ethora ecosystem
Group chat rooms are a built-in primitive of the Ethora Chat SDK. Rooms are created via a single API call and can be public, private or invite-only. Member management, message history and push notifications for offline members all come out of the box across web, iOS and Android.
For multi-tenant SaaS products and regulated industries, each app workspace gets its own isolated set of rooms, so data from one customer never bleeds into another. Self-hosted deployments give teams full control over retention policies and audit access to room history.
