This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it's a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.

I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven't been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.

I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!

I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?

The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.

To me, I

Matrix for synchronous chat Threadiverse/Fediverse community for announcements and discussion Discourse for forums (smaller possible channels) OpenSource based Software forges like Forgejo (codeberg.org) or gitlab (gitlab.com) for issue tracking, code repo, Dev artfacts, and CI/CD.

The exciting things for these lay in the future though: ForgeFed to federate between forges like codeberg, gitlab, and independent instances of those software, plus federate to whole fediveriverse!

With the fediverse plugin for discourse

the commune app's to take matrix chats and growing them into full posts on fediverse is super exciting to me too

All of these helping to meet people where they are at in Free internet instead of the techno feudal states. There should be work to bridge to those people too, but I hope we can the Free internet better more.

I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren't for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.

Discord isn't searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I'm aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).

I haven't had much success yet, but I'm slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren't ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.