Yeah that sounds like a huge pain in the ass, and even for us technical users, why would I want to join someone's self-hosted chat server as opposed to just joi

Yeah that sounds like a huge pain in the ass, and even for us technical users, why would I want to join someone's self-hosted chat server as opposed to just joining their Discord server? I don't see any harm in using Discord or Slack, but I can think of benefits. Now, why use a chat server at all over a forum where information can be persisted and more easily searchable, and where people put more thought into their messages--that's the real question. Too many things are on Discord and other chat platforms that shouldn't be. The information loss/question repetition problem is huge, and various bots that mitigate the problem are arguably just band-aids for a problem that needn't exist.