After seeing the success of the rationalist tumblr Discord and the Slate Star Codex Discord, I've created a server for LessWrong in general.
It can be accessed through the Discord web client by just clicking on the link: https://discord.gg/eYqZMhm.
The Discord desktop client can be downloaded from the same link, or this one.
Discord, for those who don't know, is basically a text and voice chat platform that's become very popular recently. It has a web interface and a desktop client. It's a little bit weird to get used to, but it's very simple and for whatever reason attracts a much larger crowd than IRC or Skype does. Keep in mind I'm not proposing this as an official solution to the diaspora problem, but if enough people like it, I see no reason why it couldn't be at least a good adjunct to what we have already.
Why another communication medium? Well, why not? LessWrong itself doesn't really serve as a proper conversational locus, the IRC isn't doing much better, and the Facebook groups and Skype groups seem to be doing very badly.
Why Discord? Well, because that's where the people are at, plain and simple. I initially thought that Discord was just a gimmick -- yet another fad communication protocol and all that -- but after participating in it for a while and seeing the vibrance of the community that came from it, I figured that the most important thing is there being a critical mass of people to make discussion worthwhile. And Discord really isn't too bad of a protocol, to be honest!
Can we please not push a closed source electron based app with no options for encryption on the community ? We already have a irc channel which is on a non-tor friendly network and a slack which is practically the same thing when it comes to the frontend stack with a few differences when it comes to features. (I may be wrong about slack)
Why not go for something based on the matrix protocol which currently has support for bridges for both irc and slack ? Why must we fragment the community another time based on a temporary popular chat application which gained traction just because gamers jumped on it like they jumped on gamergate ?
https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/
It even has a meme app for those afraid of their computers based on.. you guessed it, electron. Why of course we're going to write our desktop applications in javascript and css and use a whole copy of a browser as a runtime for it.
Given that the lesswrong.com website cannot be bothered to get a free SSL certificate and thus is unable to establish an HTTPS connection... in 2017...