[ve55]

The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%, as unfortunate as it may be. Discord is definitely here to stay (and IMO will continue to do extremely well this decade - network effects are an amazingly strong force) as far as I can tell. Although I do think it's good news that they have a decent profit model, the future of the platform still may not be as bright as most of its users (who do not understand the business nor the data collected on them) may hope for.

[panic]

If there are 100 people in a server, only 1 of them needs to be able to set up a self-hosted instance to get the whole thing going. People do it all the time for Minecraft, for example. I think the problem is less the barrier to entry and more the fact that Discord is actually better than any self-hosted option available right now.