No, Discord/Slack is a mess. Interesting topics got buried in an IRC-style chat. Threaded BBS are much better for organizing communities, like Discourse. And it is open source, so no vendor lock-in with stupid age verification.

How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?

This doesn't feel like a real question... Slack free tier is basically crappy Discord, limited message history, no voice channels, huddles are also behind the paying tiers. It is basically worse on all aspects unless you start paying

Most importantly, Slack limits the amount of message history you get to keep if you’re not paying. And the payment plans are per-user fees which quickly becomes non-viable for non-commercial use.

A nonprofit I help out just moved from Slack to Discord for a very simple reason: Slack pricing was too expensive, and as the amount of people increased, the price continues to climb. Discord is free

It is not, you just aren't the customer but the product sold.

free as in beer is clearly what they mean. They are a non-profit talking about pricing.

The biggest one for me is that Discord will keep all history for free servers, whereas Slack only gives you access to 3 months iirc (and as of a year or two ago, has started permanently deleting older content).

For large communities, the very granular role-based permission system of Discord can be put to some good use, I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.

reliable message delivery, lol. slack drops messages silently. it is not fit for purpose.

Dude, Slack deletes everything almost immediately unless you have a paid version which isn't cheap.

"easier" - what really matters is end user freedom, the rest is just decoration

Wrong. What really matters is delivering dopamine reward signals in the user's brain. Everything else is just a mechanism.

Apparently not because they have 200mill users.

I also value end user freedom, but I also accept reality. And I guarantee you you have compromised on your freedom/anonymity for convenience online. We all have. And ultimately discord is so turnkey that most people just don’t care

There is no binary version of how everyone is compromised. Because I refuse a bunch of applications like Discord I can assure you my footprint is lesser than those who use it.

I agree completely. My point is that people simply will do that though, so instead of approaching it with hostility and judgment you should approach it with understanding and, if they’re willing to hear it, maybe as an opportunity to educate. Proud proclamations and judgment won’t get people to see how important this is.

It’s not just “window dressing.” UX matters. So you need to talk to people in a way that acknowledges why they want those conveniences in the first place. It’s the same reason I recommend Plex to some people and Jellyfin to others.

I'm in a Signal chat for a bar trivia group for some reason. I've missed invitations a few times cause it silently got out of date. But at least Obama can't read my messages.

You compromised your freedom, then. Signal is a central–server network with a license that means you can't legally modify the client and use it on the network, and it identifies people by their phone numbers.

The two nice features it has. I don't need bots to exist.