Github I can understand to some extent, it's a convenient temporary staying place until they can afford, community-wise, to move to something truly open, but Discord? In this day and age?
Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell are you talking about? You might not like Discord for whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or legacy is very weird sounding.
It is a non-starter.
Not public. Got to register an account and accept Discord ToS first.
There was a hype for discord about 5 years ago for EVERYTHING - discord servers were made for every little thing and there was little to no objection about it.
But in recent times, I have seen many people complain about the lack of searchability, discussion-thread management, and other stuff in Discord and moving away to forums, especially for software projects. There is definitely a lot more disgruntlement with Discord today, so their statement makes sense.
What’s your recommended alternative?
So, IRC, Matrix (these can even be interconnected) for synchronous, mailing lists or forums for asynchronous.
And of course issue tracker, where some topical communication can happen as well, but that could completely be covered by mailing lists.
There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure.
Except, that it is easier to set up? What you describe sounds reasonable. But someone needs to set all that up and host it and needs to be trusted etc.
So I guess if many people get involved and do set this up, they would convince the rest of the team to join them. But right now it is just a demand for more work for them.
Because that is a project in itself and as much as I despise discord, I understand why they just went with it.
And as for me being there for years to come, who can say that for sure? I would absolutely try to. For that matter, will Discord still be here next year?
Probably way more likely, than a random volunteer. Kling said they used discord because it was easy. No energy spend there. Migrating the communication structure is work and energy. Friction.
But so far I also did not followed developement closely, because I did not set up discord yet and do not really want to. But I realize I am not in the majority here and I do not think I am in a position to demand anything here. Your words sound a bit like demanding something.
As for random volunteers disappearing, the protection against that is easy - increase the bus factor, by multiple people having necessary access, and by keeping your infrastructure documented. This should be table stakes for any project that becomes even marginally popular.
Then, if a random volunteer disappears, things might slow down due to lack of manpower, sure, but not come to a screeching halt.
You can't increase bus factor with Discord, since it's out of your control.
That is not easy. It works till the first drama and then some angry person deletes it all, or changes and takes the keys with them. So you have to really take care who to trust.
"If the project leadership does not see a value in using open infrastructure"
And I do not think he ever said that. He just said it was easier this way for the moment. Not that discord is meant to be the solution till eternity.
Simply put, this approach is proven to work. We can always "butwhatif?" ourselves into a corner and get paralyzed because of that, but it's senseless.
So I totally agree, that there are tons of examples where it worked and in the long term I also think they should switch to something better, but for the moment I see why they don't, as it is working for them as it is.
(However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only want to download the repository, regardless of what else they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other services as well can be helpful)