Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums").
I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do.
Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view.
There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious.
I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard.
Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!"
Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.
If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer.
Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?
I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.
When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.
And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem.
They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.
Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.