Group chats die after 6 months because 3 people dominate, 10 people lurk, and nobody feels responsible for maintaining the group

You have a group chat with 12 college friends. For the first month, everyone is active. By month 3, only 4 people post regularly. By month 6, it is 2 people sending memes into a void. The other 10 feel guilty about not responding but also feel like they have nothing to add. Nobody wants to be the person who 'kills the chat' by leaving, so they stay muted. The chat is technically alive but socially dead. Occasionally someone posts 'we should all hang out!' with 3 fire emojis. Nothing happens. So what? Group chats were supposed to maintain friendships across distance. Instead, they created a new form of social guilt: the obligation to perform engagement in a dying conversation. The asymmetry between posters and lurkers creates resentment on both sides — active posters feel ignored, lurkers feel pressured. The chat becomes a reminder of a friendship group that no longer functions rather than a tool that sustains it. Most adults over 30 are in 5-15 group chats, of which 80%+ are functionally dead. Why does this persist? Group chats have no social structure. There is no moderator, no agenda, no rhythm. A 12-person chat is actually 66 unique relationships (12 choose 2), but the format forces all communication into a single stream. The person who is close with 3 people in the group must broadcast to all 12. The medium (group text) does not match the social reality (overlapping subgroups with different closeness levels). Nobody has built a tool that maintains friend groups with the right cadence, structure, and subgroup awareness.