[petre]

You usually own the domain, unless you sell out of course. So you can start wherever you want from scratch on your own or on leased infrastructure. People will connect to the domain/irc network.

I'm not saying you should use IRC over Discord, but hey, that's how the web got centralised and why certain platforms have lots power: because people just gave it to them. If Discord decides to monetize by leveraging ads, good luck to you and your community.

[ziml77]

You don't truly own the domain though. You rent it. You have to continually pay to maintain control over it. It also wouldn't be hard for the registrar to claim you violated their ToS and revoke your access to the domain (or if they don't think they can get away with that, then they can say that they failed to process your payment when the domain renews and then snatch it up instantly themselves so you can't get it back).

[petre]

Yes you have to continually pay pizza money, yearly, true. Rent a country level domain and it won't be revoked without a judicial order. Also rent from a registrar with good reputation.