Discord have actually begun offering their own forum-like channel type [0], which I personally really like the idea of. I'm not a fan of Discord in general and I don't like how they've basically swallowed up all of the communities I'm in, but I'm glad they have an option for channels that are more forum-like now.
That's great, but unfortunately it doesn't solve a huge issue: discord isn't indexed by search engines. It's awesome when you know exactly where to look for the forum, but you can't easily discover it.
Extremely good point, and one that I unfortunately can't see changing under the current Discord architecture. It's a shame how Discord "servers" are so insular the way they've created them.
Maybe there's room for next-gen self hosted forum software with chat feature.
Chat at a typical forum-esau's discord's pace isn't that fast - you don't need a giant horizontally-scaling architecture to support your community's chat needs.
Heh or maybe you just frankenstein a forum with an irc server (with hosted history) and call it a day!
[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...