I know how to run pi, but that doesn't mean it makes sense for everyone else or even most of the people. Say you have some open source project and there is a need to have some form of communication. You can either jump through the hoops to host your own forum that you need to host and monitor. Now you are spending time you could be using to work on your project on sysadmin stuff. So either you pay for it, which feels bad when there is free alternatives available which will do the job just as well with only lacking some discoverability in form of text search, but you can redemy that by making a sticky comment where you have FAQ or whatever you need.
Evne with digital ocean you still need to worry your server and keep it up to date which again takes time out of your actual project.
I don't see what problems you people see with Discord. Yeah you can't take all of the conversation data with you, but is that really what you would even want? I don't know what kind of projects you are running where forum is so much superior to discord.
