we were using the message author before, which made sense for incoming
messages, but then all the replies were getting dumped to a directory
for the bot, which doesn't make much sense. this will use the "first
recipient", which sounds kind of like a backwards-compat attribute but
does what we want for single-user DMs
if we ever care heavily about multi-user DMs we should maybe look at
channel.recipients, but that probably changes over time, so we'd need
to use channel.id?