Discord is amazing, especially with the advanced search features, and now threads. An open source alternative to discord like the one featured on ShowHN recently would be ideal.
The only blocking issue is that their success (and subsequent spam/abuse issues) is greater than their focus on open access, to the extent that they formally disallow 3rd party client access.
2) throw the whole thing to the wind until I have better hardware
Hmm. You know come to think about it the chances are people with similar interests to myself are probably also stuck on older hardware too and probably won't be using Discord either...
So at the one end of the spectrum with have IMAP/SMTP, in the middle we have things like Telegram (everything's GPL3! The protocol is terrible and here are all the details! Go nuts!)... and at the other end we have Discord: One Protocol, One Allowed Client™®©.
Do I use Discord? No.
Would I like to use Discord? Yes.
Why can't I use Discord? The client is too much for my older laptop.
Would I like to use Discord? Yes there are a pile of people on there I'm missing out
Can I do anything about it? Yes, I have two options:
1) use https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ until it suffers the same fate as https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless
2) throw the whole thing to the wind until I have better hardware
Hmm. You know come to think about it the chances are people with similar interests to myself are probably also stuck on older hardware too and probably won't be using Discord either...