Yeah I totally see this trend too. I think there's a reasonable hybrid model between private group chats and traditional social networking (i.e. photo albums, events, payments, posts, etc).

In fact, I've been working on this idea for a while now and just launched on HN a few hours ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20933272. It's definitely a response to current trends of people leaving social media due to negative effects on social and mental health. I saw this happening to my friend groups first hand and knew something had to change.

Yep, I've noticed this. I'm in the younger part of the millenials, and am a teacher. My students pretty much all use Snapchat for group chats, and quite a few are using Discord, even if they're non-gamers. I use Discord, and have recently found myself trying to get more of my real-life friends into Telegram, and have multiple group chats running via SMS. It's just so much better, imo. Only reason I have Facebook is for some event notifications but I might delete it soon (deactivated it for over 6 months, didn't miss it).