Say what you will about Slack -- but it understands that work identity needs to be distinct, and it's nearly the only platform that does.

Discord doesn't understand this.

FB (certainly) doesn't understand this.

Telegram doesn't understand this.

Matrix doesn't understand this.

Discord is the communications platform that weirds me out the most on this. It was made for gamers, but now is a community place for tech workers as well?

Deeply strange to me. These are the two pools of notifications that I *least* want intertwined.

Telegram has the ability to have two accounts in the app. It seems like this should help having distinct work/play identities.

It's... rough, though. You have to switch them in a very active way. Many parts of the settings are... confused about it. And the contacts upload...

Funny story about Telegram and your contacts info.

Even if you try really, really hard not to let it upload your contacts info -- say "no" on ever prompt...

It still looks at your phone number. And sends messages to *those* people who have uploaded their phonebook and have you.

Which is a little weird, because if, say, you get a decade old phone number, and use it to make a second Telegram account for work...

Be prepared to get decade stale booty calls, I guess? On your nice newly-minted "work" identity? Yeeeahhh.

(No, this is not hypothetical.)

Matrix is the biggest disappointment to me on this -- because it's *close*.

Matrix has a concept called "communities" which seems like it could be a good channel-aggregation system for building, well, communities.

What we need are work/play identities (or whatever separations you want).

Having communities as groups of channels is useful.

But if I can't have identity separation, it's still useless. New inbound messages need to hit distinct identities. These need to not leak nor seep.

The *mild* user story here is "I want to separate notifications based on which identity they're hitting". (Which is a sensible thing to do because we generally box identities by time -- I'm in work mode or I'm in play mode, etc.)

But it fits so well with sharper user stories.