[cutemonster]

Maybe parts of the answer lies in that you had to do something: mute the channels.

Maybe others just accept the defaults

[oblio]

True, but in every chat app ever that I've used, nothing is muted by default.

And the reasoning is quite simple, for the average user who doesn't change any default value, a by-default-muted chat app is useless. There would be no messaging as far as a regular user would be concerned. What good is a chat app where you can't chat? :-)