[hombre_fatal]

Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that.

It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum.

It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.

[kitsunesoba]

"I already have an account there," is a much more powerful force than some realize. Signup fatigue is real, and a lot of people will just hit the back button if it turns out they need to register a new account to participate.

[Zak]

This is something federation (e.g. Lemmy) solves, but it has its own signup fatigue that's higher than average.

OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow. Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only widely-accepted providers.

Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism for independent forums and reduced signup fatigue.

[wyclif]

IRC had "one account, infinite communities" too.

[TeMPOraL]

Sorta, kinda. The total set of communities you wanted to participate in were likely spread across 2 or 3 major IRC servers, and possibly several smaller ones. Though out of all UX problems IRC had, this was arguably a minor issue. At the very least, registering an account didn't come with so many strings attached as it does on the web.

That said, IRC was an information black hole in just the same way Discord is, for the same reasons. In my personal experience, running an official channel alongside the official community mailing list was a huge PITA, as the very existence of that IRC channel required constant oversight and regular reminders of its subservient/non-binding role, as otherwise it would quickly end up with the whole community being taken over by a small group of people who had too much free time, and therefore could coordinate everything amongst themselves on IRC, in near real-time.

You could call it "OODA loop mismatch" - IRC and Discord run through their OODA loops an order of magnitude faster than mailing lists and discussion boards, and as a result, unless actively prevented, they take over the community and cut out people who can't keep pace.