Yeah it's an @aggroed project ran by @reazuliqbal ... and we've been pretty happy with their product. Has been nice to use. Would love to see more interfaces using it because it seems to be mostly just nftshowroom that uses it the most and us. And our subscribing to a channel is feature peakd did so it's not decentralized among interfaces.
I'm guessing there are still a few more things we can do with beechat even as it is now. However it's gonna be a good test to see how much it gets used now that communities can turn it on.
There was a demand for open chat, private chat, and direct messaging; since day one. But what happened was many moved over to Discord. Once that gained popularity and was endorsed more and more, we noticed engagement on chain steadily decline. Some blame the lack of votes being placed on comments but that's only a small part of the picture. Can't vote for a comment if there isn't one to vote for.
At some point the trend needs to be reversed so more traffic remains, consistently enjoying the various features of Hive.