• momentum: everyone else is using it, if you want to talk to them, you better start using it as well. this also includes cretain projects replacing traditional forums with discord servers.
• features: i haven't found another chat app that offers text, voice and screen sharing simultaneously without it being either paid or an absolute pita.
• no payment or selfhosting needed. no average person wants to deal with self hosting a chat app (even less so when it's not federated)

For just having fun with friends nothing else comes close. It's not the best at every thing it does, but it does them all well enough and in one place, for free.

It really shouldn't be used in the way big projects try to. There aren't moderation tools to help with managing huge numbers of people, and like you said the threads and forums features aren't really user friendly.

I have several communities I run. one has a large number of active users.

if I wanted to pick up and move the whole community to another platform, everyone would have to come at once.

the people in my servers are also in other communities. they won't just up and leave discord for one community. and I'm not interested in destroying the place a lot of these people call home unless I can get a majority of people to move all at once.

do you know how impossible that is? in order for discord to truly die (which btw I hope for. heavily), it would actually have to die. like meaning a MASS exodus where everyone is abandoning the platform in droves.

but its the only place certain communities that I use exist. its more complicated than "Discord bad don't use." I wish I didn't have to. but its where literally 95% of all my friends are.

Screensharing mostly, signal has it but it's only desktop at 5 fps and rev- I mean stoat is still working on it

I've looked for something else that has same audio filtering quality, group voice chats and screen sharing with audio, for free. I didn't find it.

People spend a lot of time in voice chats in private rooms with their friends. Voice quality and filtering is supremely important to those users. Once you get used to the ease of access of screen sharing, you will miss it if it's gone.

I think the forum thread functionality and projects moving their support and communities to Discord only happens because it's a platform where people are already on. Discord doesn't need to be good at those things. Primarily people use Discord to voice chat in private rooms and game while talking. I have access to rooms with friends and acquaintances, where there are people in voice chat, doing stuff all hours of the day. I can drop in and see what they are up to and join in, if I so desire. Often they are screen sharing what they are doing for one reason or another.

A competitor has to do what Discord does and better to get it's users. It also has to be free.

Because people use it. It’s taken the place of forums, and in some cases even fucking customer support. Ugh.

The audio is not actually good in discord btw. It has insane input lag and compression. Teamspeak is still king in terms of audio.