I think that reducing the functionality of Discord to “ephemeral chat” is vastly selling short the functionality on offer.
Do you disagree with the ‘real’ statement that GP was trying to say, that whatever “functionality on offer” that Discord provides is a poor substitute for forums?
- The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it.
- Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms.
- Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events.
- Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction.
- No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account.
I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality.
People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.