It is really frustrating to me that discord seems to have taken over half of the use cases that forums used to fill. Reddit stole most of the other half, but every time I look into discord I cannot understand the popularity and people's willingness to push past all of the privacy and access friction it introduces.

This is the reason. Before Midjourney, www.eleuther.ai’s Discord had an image generation channel. There the benefits of generating socially were made obvious. People help each other, learn from each other, riff off each other. It accelerated technique evolution tremendously.

Midjourney is a small team. They are working on a web interface. But, won’t release it until it is significantly better than all the benefits they get from Discord. Meanwhile, they’ve been too busy making quality improvements and scaling the service to keep up with demand.