• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.

it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.

Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮

Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It's one of the worst platforms to use.

I feel like so many people talk about how it's not searchable or other concerns but for me I don't really care so much because there's an even bigger deal breaker which is their license agreement, where you sign away the property rights of anything you post, giving away your entire open source project.. This alone should disqualify it for any work of any creative sort. They own things you give them. I would never use it for development because of this.

Lemmy communities with discord channels are really quite something.

Its awful, history isnt kept, requires account creation on a non FLOSS app. It sucks. Forums were better.

I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.

Discord is the worst. Requires a phone number, does not allow email aliases and logs your chats.

Matrix and SimpleX is way better