> There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easierIt exists, it requires minimal competence or attention to technically administer, and it provides adequate (though not great) tooling for moderation (which is then significantly improved at scale with third-party tools). It also provides a unifying umbrella with a single set of affordances where everything is, from shitposting friend groups to technical projects.
IRC exists, at least in a technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct sense. It requires nontrivial competence and attention to technically administer (and like, I wrote an IRC server once and still don't ask me to tell you, or to give a damn, what the alphabet soup of flags does). Moderation is actively bad, helped only by it being sufficiently annoying to get onto IRC that you probably are putting up a "you must be this tall to ride" gate.
It also just sucks to use. Phones exist and supporting them adequately is not optional in 2023. Bouncers are not a solution, they are an additional problem.
There's also limited space in people's brains for all the alternatives. Most people seem to find that That One Friend Who Uses Telegram (or Signal, or WhatsApp) when everybody else you know is on the Signal (or Telegram, or WhatsApp) island to be drifting away--it's not dissimilar. This also ejects Zulip--which is quite nice, IMO--and Mattermost-- which is not--and similar because when you've already got Slack and Discord fighting for cognitive space, a third option had better be step-change better, and they're not.
> It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency.
Sure? It was good enough, soon enough. Other things weren't good enough or soon enough.
> I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else.
Great, but most people...don't, and it's not hard to understand why. Chat has won because the world is an increasingly frustrating place and people have steadily decreasing ability to care about fucking with stuff. Forums are, for the most part, fucking with stuff. And worse: it's fucking with stuff for an unclear payout with regards to the thing that the prospective visitor cares about.
Other people don't care about your stuff as much as you care about your stuff, and that's not a dig, that's just how people's brains work. You can go stand alone, and appeal to the sliver who want to deal with creating an account and validating an email address and figuring out where the reply button is (oops it was the post button, now I created a new thread and people think I'm a rude jerk)...or you can use the thing everybody already does use, understands, and at least is willing to tolerate.
Unless you have a forum that has a genuine raison d'etre to stand alone as a thing, and are willing to consider a low-cut filter a feature of your community, it's a bad choice. And if you do qualify for those maybe it's a great choice, but most things simply do not.
Something Awful provides a real reason to be a distinct thing. Most other attempts at forums don't, regardless of topic.