Agreed on all fronts. Discord is one of our primary references, though the MVP will be closer to Telegram.

OpenSeed functions very similarly to SteemConnect, except in addition to allowing apps to post on your behalf, it also enables them to integrate additional features. So PeakD could use OpenSeed to do everything SteemConnect does, AND any other features offered in OpenSeed like chat, off-chain posts and comments, and more. Also, we could have the messages on chain, we just think it would be more harmful to Hive than beneficial. It would also be a more complicated implementation and the user experience would likely be worse. But we could use either the Memo operation or custom JSON ops to store messages, it’s just not a good idea. So that is a conscious design decision and so far every app developer we’ve spoken to agrees with it.

Appreciate the kind words, maybe I deserved some of that shit ;)

Doing the opposite of what Heimin does is a pretty good rule of thumb IMO 😂