4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
After reading the comments on several communities including Lemmy, reddit, YouTube and several others, I don't get the feeling that FOSS users are as enthusiastic about discord as you portray. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps it's a restriction that you impose on your users?
Besides, all the bells and whistles of Discord don't solve the biggest gripe that I have with it - the searchability and discoverability of questions and answers. Despite the history recording in Discord, it acts essentially as an information black hole. People's efforts in solving problems are just lost because they can't be found again.
And finally, there's one thing that corporate social media has proven time and again. Eventually all of them pivot for some reason or another. Perhaps they want to monetize the platform on unacceptable terms (like reddit recently). That will happen to discord too some day. They are holding the community content hostage. Don't make the mistake of thinking that they won't ever try to make money off it, cutting the community from it.
I mean, I don't disagree with you, but our forums are dead. Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.
All I can really say is my experiences, and what I have seen in other cases too.
I wish Discord weren't the giant that it was, and I wish it were open-source, but unfortunately that's just how these things go sometimes I guess.
Again, I think another good example of this is RPCS3. They have forums that are pretty dead, and they have a Discord that has a ton of users in there.
What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don't mind using it.
But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It's only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) very young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That's a very small part of humanity.
If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.
Like a survivorship bias?
Ooh! I'm surprised that somebody made the same conclusion, but from a different perspective.