It looks like things would get hectic and cluttered pretty quick, is the UX designed to use side-scrolling to move between open conversations?

The design seems to think that'll you'll be closing chats to keep things uncluttered, but the chat just pops back up if someone else sends a message to it, so I imagine this would turn communication into a game of whack-a-mole and I'd guess that it would (d)evolve into a few relevant persistent conversations pretty quickly.

Honestly it reminds me of GChat in the GMail client, except I don't get to see my emails while chatting and conversations are cluttered with random hashtags.