[bluecalm]

Discord is 5 years old. The reason more and more people and projects use it over competition is that it offers better experience. It's not about some magic momentum they luckily got. I use it and moved my project to it. Last time I played a video game was about 20 years ago. Quoting one other commenter here: it's much better than Zoom, Slack and Teams combined and it's not a small margin. They delivered while everyone else failed. That's why people love it.

[kortilla]

Nope. I only finally signed up because my friends are on it for gaming. Don’t give a shit about it otherwise.

Your use case of “putting a project” on it is a minority. Most users are there for gaming communities.

[Jetrel]

Yeah, the open-source project I'm on moved all of our dev communications (†all of them) to discord, several years ago, and gladly left IRC without the dignity of a burial.

† Email and mailing lists were something we forbade from day 1. There are a variety of sociological reasons why they're vile, but I think a lot of it has to do with bikeshedding, via "low-cost involvement" - people who care more about potstirring than actually getting work done have a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on big announcement and pick fights. I've experienced a huge number of people who've earned a 'stake in the discussion' by making some small contribution, and then jumped in on every discussion trying to exercise some informal kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto (insofar as such a thing arises naturally from the basic human decency of giving people the benefit of the doubt). What I like about realtime comms - especially ones with nice, logged discussions in multiple, visible rooms, is you don't have to be plugged-in 24/7 to keep up with stuff like you would on IRC (without a bouncer), but at least you have to have some real "skin in the game" of paying attention and being involved - which generally biases towards the folks doing the real work. Decisions get made without the armchair generals; occasionally they'll show up after some big decision got executed on and something was built, with an angry assertion of "Why wasn't I consulted?!?"††, but usually the existence of the actual finished work, fait accompli, tends to to stifle that nonsense real fast.

After multiple decades of dealing with that petty squabbling on email, I don't miss it at all. It was a huge source of burnout.

†† https://www.ftrain.com/wwic