Formal mentorship used to follow a recognizable shape: a senior person, a junior person, a scheduled check-in. That shape is harder to find now, and for a lot of people it has been replaced by something less official — a small, ongoing group chat with three or four peers, none of them officially anyone's mentor, doing much of the same work.
Why the informal version works as well as it does
A single mentor can only draw on their own experience, and a junior person often needs answers that fall outside it. A small group of peers, each a little further along in a different direction, collectively covers more ground than one designated mentor usually can. One person answers a pricing question well. Another has actually dealt with the specific client problem being described. The advice arrives distributed rather than from a single source, which turns out to cover a wider range of real situations.
The informal structure also removes the pressure that a formal mentorship relationship can carry on both sides — the junior person worrying about wasting time, the senior person feeling obligated beyond what they have capacity for. A group chat has no single person to disappoint, which paradoxically makes people more willing to ask for help there than they would with one designated mentor.
