Here is my two cents:

Well, if you want to know a secret, you're absolutely correct. Discord is a shitty kludged-together meme app that will probably die as soon as the venture capital realizes nobody is going to pay to use a resource-heavy and horribly formatted electron app that basically amounts to a non-compliant RFC 1459 implementation that's proprietary for the sole reason that anyone who actually cared could cut them out of the loop by doing an infinitely better job.

And when that happens, I hope you'll join me in pushing as hard as we can for Matrix. But there has to be something for us to push.

The Discord channels for SSC and for rat-tumb have gained more users in the last several days, and seem to have had more activity in them erstwhile, than either IRC or Skype or even LessWrong itself have gained in the last several weeks. It's simple and it's easy and it has the people on it who actually make things happen. As the saying goes, if it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.

I think that Matrix is promising and I hope that, God willing, everyone would be able to seamlessly move to it someday -- but right now, what's important is not creating an optimal environment from first principles, but making use of a platform that a large number of people already agree on. Before moving a community to a new and unfamiliar platform, a community must exist.

EDIT: This comment originally said that the map wasn't properly centered on the actual location of the meetup, but I figured out how to fix it.

I've sent him the message. Thanks!

Hi. I've never made a post here before, so I don't know if I'm following the proper etiquette, but I'd like to ask if you could add Ann Arbor to your list of regularly scheduled meetups. It's listed on the wiki, but I don't know how to link to it.