That workaround is obviously not ideal & still requires an account (& possibly a phone number too). And your private message will still be logged. And using the service also still causes a big issue for search as you can’t find solutions using an engine like you could with a forum.

If there are the resources a community would self-host a decentralized, federated server where users are in control of their account/data along with the community in control of moderation, bans, CoC, ToS… & then bridge to other services from that base if they are seen as useful. If a community has less resources certain servers use less resources—especially if the server isn’t supposed to hold the entire history (which these chat rooms shouldn’t be seen as a place for permanent decision making anyhow).

we're fixing that on the Matrix side: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... :)

Eh, I mean it’s better than Discord & Slack, yes. The Matrix model of mirror the entire history of all user conversations, including attachments, make it costly to host the storage side. This in turn makes self-hosting not appeal which has lead to de facto centralization around Matrix.org. I would like to see a greater uptake in XMPP MUCs as it’s way lighter to self-host …or IRCv3 which is lightweight but has some modern comforts. Chat needs to be treated an non-permanent where Slack & Discord have made folks over-reliant on it & now we can no longer do a simple web search.