I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.
Think of a discord channel as a permanent thread or a topic and a discord server like an irc channel. I find discord's model more manageable than irc for a large number of users; irc channels become a mess around 50-100 active users. Dividing the conversations into topics helps a lot.
(I have been using irc since around 1994 and am still somewhat active.)
First thing I do when joining a new "server" is to mute all and any broadcast (@everyone/@here/roles) mentions. Broadcast mentions should have never been invented.
What "ownership" and "power?" Discord controls it all.
A server is to IRC what Discord is in its entirety
A channel is to IRC what a server is to Discord
If IRC let you subsection a channel, those would be channels to Discord
And instead of obnoxious netsplits, you get annoyed with popups to buy Nitro or whatever other crap whenever you log in