I don’t love that projects use discord now, but I don’t hate it either. Beyond the crappy search, what other reasons make discord a bad fit for technical forums? What’s your preferred solution?

My question was driven by the fact I don't have a preferred solution that would suit both technical and non-technical users.

But as for why Discord is a bad fit - it's completely opaque to search engines, it requires an invite, it has a fairly complex UI and it's basically "unstructured chat". Threads are an afterthought and don't come close to giving any proper structure.

I want chat for people that, you know, want to chat - but structured posts with topics and categories are needed for any sane, long term knowledge-base.

People on chat (this goes for IRC as well) will continually ask the same questions and you will continually have to answer them again because there's no structure.