[egypturnash]

People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the updates and maintenance.

Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.

Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.

Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?