One time I participated in a small local event that required submitting photos via tagged Instagram posts. I was annoyed at that, until I realized it completely eliminated the need for any technical expertise for the organizers.

- single sign-on

- abuse protection

- has sign-on flow for later if you want to migrate

- someone else hosts assets

- existing account flow means low friction to join for existing account holders (common in the space)

- allows users to see other users at same time as use product

- bot easy to spin up and async functionality is inherent

Yeah for sure. I guess one advantage is that since it's already in a chat, people can react and talk about it as it's happening.

It's annoying but I can see why its happening

It's annoying to have to do this for every server though, I agree.

There would still have to be hosting, moderation controls, high availability, low latency, etc. etc. engineering that "someone" would have to handle and own (ideally decentralized / p2p), but I believe it could be solved if ever incentives could align and a will could arise.