[lproven]

Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.

For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.

For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.

[rcarmo]

As someone who has been lurking in 9fans for ages, I understand the sentiment but we need to have some sort of standardization for regular folk to be able to discuss things and create new knowledge databases. Discord ain't it, and neither are mailing lists these days.