Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.
No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search feature to find your question among a billion chat messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel. Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of messages we receive per day.
Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.