To be fair, the experience is very different. The chat is:
- more compact visually, which is exactly what is needed for chats
- faster
- can be in a popup window while you’re at some topic - so you can edit long-term memory topics while discussing it with someone in a chat in the same screen
A philosopy of where Discourse is going according to my observation from its very beginning is that topics, PMs, and chats are all converging into the same thing and share more and more features (it can be either planned/conscious or unconscious). So if I we can get PMs that “float” like chat windows, are more compact in that “chat” mode, and are super fast, then yes we do not need chat with encryption, we’ll be just using encrypted PMs.