Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forums are still used a lot, you would think this would result in forum software that's great, but no Discourse is a horrible experience by default. Discourse is so horrible people would rather use Discord or Reddit - that's how horrible it is.
In what way? I think I recognise the Discourse forum software across several sites I've used (correct me if I'm wrong about any of these these someone!): - https://discuss.ocaml.org/ - https://forum.rescript-lang.org/ - https://discuss.huggingface.co/ - https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ - https://discuss.pytorch.org/ - https://forum.strapi.io/ (maybe) I don't know if it's a pain to run for maintainers or something…
Thank god someone else like Linen is trying their shot at it, before Discourse kills forums by being terrible.
Genuinely don’t know how you prefer it to anything, the only thing it has over Discord is being searchable, the rest is obnoxious. The giant avatar bubbles, the random large numbers thrown everywhere, hiding easy to navigate features from forums in favor of endless scrolling, list goes on.