In general, I agree with your observation that “Yet Another Platform” is a very tough thing to sell to the community unless it really adds utility that we don’t have. However, I’m not sure I agree with your comment that “MediaWiki is what our volunteers use” in the area of communication and dialogue. In fact, that’s been the problem in that we don’t like using on-wiki for complex or engaged conversation. Instead, as Quim mentioned, Telegram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord and others outside the wiki sphere have become very active. So I’m not entirely against the idea of a new platform, especially with the strong translation capabilities that the other platforms really lack.
However, if this platform is to have a chance of succeeding, it has to surface interesting conversations easily and quickly, and the default display doesn’t do that, I’m afraid. To do that, In the “Latest” display on the right hand side of the front page, I’d like to see real usernames and at least part of the first sentence of the reply. This way I can quickly scan to see if it’s something worth reading. Otherwise, click in, click out, click in, click out, is a very 1990s bulletin board system way of reading content.