Discord is walled and hard to search. If a channel or server closes then all that information is lost.
Tons of data will be lost to discord when it goes down.
Idk if you've ever tried to use discord for mods or other software but it sucks. It's confusing. Information isn't cataloged well. It's search sucks. It just isn't good for this kind of thing.
Discord becomes a maze of random posts going back years with links to expired third party sites. Searching them is difficult and time consuming.
Then it all changes based on which server you're on and how those people decided to do it, so none of your experience from the previous server transfers.
This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder.
That being said, this feature also makes Discord inappropriate for things like release announcements, patch notes, etc. which should be publicly accessible.
That seems to be a counterpoint to your argument. Users on Twitter usually do not hold back.
Contrast this to Discord which is more like old-school IRC, in that even when everyone is using an alias, if you talk to the same people day-in day-out, you know a fair bit about their personal lives, such as name and where they work.
Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Reddit has invite only forums that I believe aren’t searchable unless you are a member. Oh and searchable if you’re a member? That’s true for Discord.
Let's hearken back to the olden days of Usenet, when every single message was transported from machine-to-machine, in the clear, and it was an essential feature of NNTP and the Usenet groups themselves that everyone could read every message and process them any way they saw fit.
Usenet was helpfully indexed by topic, and so most sane posts went out already pre-sorted into the place where you'd want to search for them, but if you were a privileged user with a local Usenet feed, you could literally loop around the filesystem searching any term you wanted, because all messages and forums were plain files sorted into plain directories.
A famous consequence of this openness, for example, was a talk.bizarre denizen by the name of "Kibo". One of the possibly-true rumors about this larger-than-life figure was that he exhaustively "grepped" Usenet for his name [pseudonym] and thereby found out immediately whenever he was mentioned by another poster, and therefore able to join the conversation with his acerbic wit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry
Myself being introduced to Usenet around 1990, and MUD/MUCK/MUSH around the same time, I feel that it did not take long to condition me to living life "in the clear" and at least subconsciously knowing that everything I wrote had zero essential privacy. This was orthogonal to my home life, where my parents heard everything I said and did, or my religion, where there is an omniscient deity, who is thankfully full of goodness and kindness.
For anyone who's paranoid or got their knickers in a twist about surveillance culture in this modern world, I suggest that you study Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders [there's an American remake, but please forget that]. Wings of Desire is a character study and a meditation on the possibility that ubiquitous surveillance doesn't need to be nefarious or evil, but perhaps, just maybe, has some benign and even beneficial effects on a cohesive society which tends to act in good faith.
I mean I use it for voice chatting with friends while gaming too and it's fine for that.
But if I have to beg and plead to a discord bot to join a channel to just read some docs, I'm just going to ignore your project. Not sorry about that at all.
I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.