Discuss: I found the ‘categories first’ view quite confusing and frustrating, it was difficult to find what was the global recent discussions and I kept having to go to latest to see what was going on. I changed it back before I noticed it was changed in this thread! Hope people don’t mind - if there are particular important topics we can also leverage stickies.
Email doesn’t seem like a terrible backup idea, and as @arnetheduck says there are mailing lists. This is quite common in the OSS world, for example it’s how a lot of the coordination in Linux works. Google groups is also a set of mailing lists under the hood IIRC.
Another way that I have seen work is to make sure all important communications go out at least two ways (pick two out of Email+Status+Discuss, etc). E.g. confidential: email+Status PM/group chat. Public: Status public chat +Discuss.
We can also consider a bi-weekly/monthly newsletter format to deal with important announcement. This way someone could live in a cave somewhere and still know what they should do about Devcon.
If I understand the multiple Discuss instances correctly, I’d be against it. Seems like a lot of complexity and overhead for what’s (right now) a fairly low volume forum.