Notifications

Your Group Chat All Evening

An Awards Night, a Busy Group Chat and a Muted Phone

A group chat can buzz for every message in it, not only for the mentions and replies meant for one person.1 This is one of those evenings, in Mei’s living room.

  • WhatsApp lets each group alert for every message or only for Highlights: mentions, replies and other direct interactions.1
  • In Discord, each server can alert for All Messages, Only @mentions or Nothing, and a single channel can be set apart from the rest of its server.2
  • Discord decides inside the app which messages send a notification at all. The phone’s own settings then decide how that notification appears.2
Mei on a sofa in a dim living room with a bowl of popcorn in her lap, a phone buzzing on the arm beside her, a television and a lamp behind

Mei settles in for a long ceremony

It is Sunday evening, and the awards are starting on TV. Mei has a bowl of popcorn in her lap and her phone on the arm of the sofa. Her group chat in WhatsApp has an opinion about every award, and it is already buzzing.

Mei on the sofa looking down at her phone, the popcorn bowl beside her, the television glowing in the dark room

Mei loses track of who is presenting

Then Discord starts too. A film club Mei belongs to has a server, and its channel for the night posts something every few seconds. The phone buzzes, she reads, starts a reply and looks up to find someone new at the microphone. By nine she has lost count of who won what.

Mei standing at a bookshelf in the dim living room, reaching up to put her phone on a shelf, the sofa and popcorn bowl empty behind her

Mei silences her phone and misses a message

At nine she turns the phone to silent and puts it on the bookshelf. The rest of the ceremony goes by without a buzz. The next afternoon, scrolling back through two hundred messages in WhatsApp, she finds a reply to her question from Jonah, sent at half past nine, that explained half the night.

By nine o’clock

Mei had taken it as a choice between every buzz and none. She had no idea WhatsApp and Discord each kept a choice of their own for which messages buzz, WhatsApp’s in each group’s Notifications and Discord’s in each server’s.

True to you

What your phone does is up to you. We think so too. So we built TrueTo to make every app behave the way you do. That’s what true to you means.

TrueTo goes into each app and changes the setting the way you would. Every one of them is reversible, one at a time.

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Mei settles in for a long ceremony

If Mei had used TrueTo, it would have gone into WhatsApp and Discord and set Highlights in the group and Only @mentions in the server for her.

Mei loses track of who is presenting

With the server set to Only @mentions in Discord, the channel could have posted all night, and the phone would have buzzed only when someone mentioned her.

Mei silences her phone and misses a message

With Highlights on in WhatsApp, the group would have alerted her only for mentions and replies, Jonah’s reply among them, and each choice would have stayed hers to change back.

Only @mentions

In WhatsApp, in the group’s info under Notifications, Mei can choose Highlights herself, for mentions and replies.1 In Discord, under Notifications, which open from the server’s name, she can choose Only @mentions.2

Sources

  1. WABetaInfo, “WhatsApp beta for Android 2.24.24.10: what’s new?” WABetaInfo, November 13, 2024.
  2. Discord, “[Mobile] Notifications Settings 101,” Discord Support, read October 12, 2026.