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!
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.
I understand your thought process and I apologize for my initial tone if it was too much. I wish you luck regarding this initiative.