Disclaimer: this is just guesswork from my own experiences. I do not actually have experience in running the community of a FOSS project.
I'd guess its lowering the barrier of entry by providing a "casual" platform for communication. Discord is widespread enough for many people to already have an account. Joining new servers is dead simple.
Also, collaborator retention could be another thing. I'd argue it is easier to keep less active contributors hang along when you have this sort of "community" where people do other, unrelated stuff (post memes and discuss unrelated topics) alongside the actual work on the project.
We have GitHub issues (works fine for bugs, not so much for discussions), GitHub discussions (no one is there), added Discord by public demand (I hate it, but it’s working well. People help each other there) and plan to add Flarum as an open discussion board soon.
Have you tried Matrix[0], out of curiosity? I see quite a lot of FOSS projects on that (with the users to back it up too, obviously) and it seems to work quite well. I'm in quite a few established projects on there.
You can bridge your Discord channel(s) to Matrix rooms, so it's basically win-win unless you rely on some proprietary custom verification system (e.g. Reactiflux's complex system), although with a little work you can re-create said verification on the Matrix side.
EDIT: I apologise if the tone of my original comment came off as snarky, by the way. It's just so annoying and tiring seeing open-source projects require people be on some downright unethical[1] proprietary chat platform.
Is there a way to use Matrix without signing up for it? That’s my main problem right now
You can usually get some use out of Discord by just clicking an invitation link, but for Matrix it looks like I have to create an account with some shady unknown social networking entity
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