I am dumbfounded by the number of people signing up for these chat-based communities. Do people scroll through the threads? Are they watching notifications come through?
Chat works great for a small group of friends, I don't think it is a good fit for a community
Some telegram groups developed as some sort of community.
"Do people scroll through the threads?"
Most won't, so the same things and questions get discussed again and again. If the mod is engaged he will create sticky notes, but people also often ignore those. So - yeah, I agree. Not a good fit for a community. They sort of upgrade it though regulary, and now you can have subgroups in groups that can work as forum threads, but I experience it not as a good UX and I regulary delete telegram as it is really hard filtering out useful comments from noise.
Chat works great for a small group of friends, I don't think it is a good fit for a community