For gaming communities (where you'd use voice chat), Discord was great. Easy to set up, free as in beer, runs in cloud. The alternatives back in the days did not have these features. They were either expensive (Ventrilo) or bad quality (Ventrilo and Skype latency/quality) or proprietary (only Mumble wasn't, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo etc were) or lacked community features (Ventrilo) or these were very archaic (TeamSpeak, Mumble) or you'd have to self-host (all but Ventrilo). It was also before GDPR existed. So Discord happily used and abused that unique position.
Its a shame its being used for general communities who don't use or need the voice chat feature. Especially when its an official community for a place, given their stance on third party clients and privacy issues.
If you don't need voice chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Revolt, Discourse, and many other would suffice (Linen recently got featered on HN). If you do, I think even Signal would be suffice these days.
For Discord search, recently Answer Overflow was recently featured on HN [1].
Its a shame its being used for general communities who don't use or need the voice chat feature. Especially when its an official community for a place, given their stance on third party clients and privacy issues.
If you don't need voice chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Revolt, Discourse, and many other would suffice (Linen recently got featered on HN). If you do, I think even Signal would be suffice these days.
For Discord search, recently Answer Overflow was recently featured on HN [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773