I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.

You’re the maintainer and presumably you control the discord server. You can decide to move things to a more available platform by removing Discord as an option.

Our users do seem to like Discord, we also have a Matrix and IRC but those are dead too. Discord is where our users seem to flock to.

What is really happening is that people are looking for documentation or support, seeing that the forum, the IRC and the Matrix are dead, that the only other thing is discord, and give up. Minus some fraction who already use it for other purposes (gaming, probably) and don’t mind using it.

But from your perspective, it looks like everybody is joining discord and liking it, because all of the other people just give up. It’s only a very particular demographic that uses discord. Most likely (I might be wrong, but this is what I guess) very young, male, gamer, european descendent, and from a relatively wealthy western country. That’s a very small part of humanity.

If you as the maintainer go and use the forums, and maybe announce this in discord, the users will follow.

Is it worth the risk to just stop having a Discord. Users that strongly care will use something else?

There is one possible explanation for that conundrum. There are two types of people who are looking for solutions:

1. Those who want quick answers. They don’t want to do the research - to see if the problem has been addressed before. They don’t care about if the question has been asked before.

2. Those who prefer searching for solutions. They don’t like joining any community just to search for those solutions.

Group 2 is going to be very invisible to you (maintainers), because they ask questions only if they can’t solve the problem themselves and nobody has asked it before. (I know this because that’s me). This group isn’t a minority.

Group 1 is the vocal type that you are more likely to interact with, since their first instinct is to ask. If you provide them a choice between forums and chat rooms, they always choose chats because that’s where they can get away with providing minimal background information on their questions and doing minimal to no research.

This doesn’t mean that the majority of your users are happy with chatrooms. It’s just that your observations are going to show this survivorship bias.