First of all, public forums are a thing, they work flawlessly and provide information to people without needing to sign in, which is my top issue with Discord. And why I actually want FOSS.
Among other things, some I already mentioned, Discord isn’t even all that big, you can say Facebook has 3 bil users, let’s all go there.
But the meme is about people who can’t escape, avoiding Discord is not only possible, but specifically for support advisable, and I would argue that it’s not even that hard.
I personally have used Discord about three times before I just selfhosted Jitsi. Never understood why people want to use it so much. For chat I use Matrix since 2018.
Public forums serve a different purpose to a live chat. Actually what I’m seeing a lot in the comments is people making assumptions about what the purpose of the discord server is, and from those assumptions then conclude that it would be easy to use something else. Some assume that they use it for documentation (???), some assume it’s for technical support. But usually what I see, is that these kinds of servers are just an attempt to build a community. And for building a community in the tech space, discord has by far the biggest user base for a chat solution (unless you really think there are more target audience using Facebook messenger, than discord?)
