Jokes aside the discord ux is good enough for the average user, it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent.
I would also prefer things to be easily searchable, archivable etc but consumers consume.
In this instance: Amiga 600 Discord where we post pics of our cool Amigas good, Amiga maintenance and schematics hidden in God knows which channel on God knows which Amiga Discord server bad.
Best of both worlds: if someone asks question on a Discord and you know the answer, write a blog post (or whatever, as long as it is on the open Web) and link it back! You are guaranteed to have at least 1 readerr which is wildly above the average blog post lol
There are plenty of equivalents - Slack, Microsoft Teams etc offer the same IRC + persistent messages + searchable + persistent user accounts & admin + multi-device + image sharing + file sharing + spam protection product.
They're just even worse, by most of the metrics that make people hate discord.
The big difference is in vibes. Slack is unashamedly corporate and would love to sell you premium SSO integration. They could cut out (or offend) the free community tier, no sweat. On the other hand Discord is more gaming aligned, and would love to sell you some premium custom emojis. Offending the free tier users or getting rid of the free tier is a lot less compatible with their business model.
Guilded has entered the chat