discord makes hosting a real-time online place for most communities of all sizes very easy. it also doubles as a free cross-platform messaging app with a massive userbase. as the top-level GP posted, it mostly has a superset of the features of other community/messaging platforms (at the cost of searchability and data ownership/privacy).

as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups, school clubs, unofficial classroom servers, game communities, fanbases, etc - anything that can benefit from conversations organized into different channels is usually turned into a discord server.

when I think "how can I take this group of people interested in the same thing to gather together online?", the alternatives that come up are:

- facebook (too linked to real life identity, also not really great for separating conversations into specific channels to my understanding) - reddit/forums (which can compliment a discord server in being more searchable/async, but in no way rival Discord's real time text/voice chat) - mumble/teamspeak/skype/matrix (largely just has a subset of discord features) - slack/microsoft teams (pretty much solely designated for work and not at all marketed as a general purpose communication solution)