HN loves to complain about Discord (with good reason), but Discord is anti-gloss.
Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how good your product is, those messages will just get buried and will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.
Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all of them and end the online network effect altogether.
My biggest problem with Discord is still more related to support communities (what would have previously been a focused forum or subreddit) moving there, and the subsequent lack of archival of topics and answers for future reference.
This has actually been fixed in the past ~6 months, and quite nicely.
They added the concept of a "forum" channel, where you can have individual support questions, and each one has its own thread that addresses that specific question.
Better yet; the search box and the "make a new post" box are the same box. So if you're starting to ask your question, as you type, it's filtering previous questions based on the words in the question you're trying to ask.
The Zig programming language community has a very active Discord, and they use the forum mode. I've searched for questions I feel "certain" someone else would have asked (like how to convert a `[]const u8` to a `[255]const u8`) and rarely can get Discord's search to find something relevant. Thankfully, the community answers quickly anyway.
As I type a message in Discord, a pop up appears next to my cursor with some disabled Emoticons, prompting me to pony up my credit card and upgrade to Nitro... so I can include these in my message.
I've never seen an ad on Discord, but I have seen them trying to sell premium features. When I talk about Discord being "anti-gloss", I mean all live-chat formats, Discord, Matrix, IRC, etc.
Using matrix.org to post in public/private chat rooms is practical, and can chose any client to CRUD content, or subscribe to rooms (feeds). Element allows export of room contents (with attachments) to JSON or XML. https://libli.org/libli-news:matrix.org
Small Discord communities can generate a lot of discussion, a lot of user generated content. Discord is also a poor place to do stealth advertising; if you post fake messages about how good your product is, those messages will just get buried and will never show up in a search result; it's not very effective.
Things changed this year. We saw the rise of LLMs and the fall of Twitter and Reddit and the rise of federated social networks. I think the Twitter / Mastodon format is more robust for both small and large user bases; the Reddit format is dying. Real-time chat rooms still have a place, especially with the right tooling / notifications. LLMs threaten to replace all of them and end the online network effect altogether.