@johannesbottcher I don't like the fragmentation either, but as I noted on Twitter, the existing options were undesirable (in my opinion):

Clemens runs a fantastic blog, but the forum infrastructure he uses is lacking in usability (sorry!)

SE chat is great from a usability perspective, but puts a very restrictive cap on message length. As far as I know, it's also impossible to use higher elements of markdown.

Gitter chat does not have a user cap for public repositories and this room in particular has the advantage of being linked to a presentation-agnostic source of TeX examples, etc.