Wasn’t there some talk a few months ago about Microsoft putting in an offer to buy Discord and the creator of Discord not being interested in selling? I recall it being a big deal and then it wasn’t. - penalty because MS never actually, publicly extended the offer.

No arguments from me on any of those.

No offense was meant. It seemed like your post drew a distinction where there isn't one. Even from a non-technical perspective, the Discord server system is roughly the same as the Reddit subreddit one. My point was it doesn't represent a shift to smaller communities or parallel old-school forums at all.

Lots of servers I'm on are boosted. That's not something I can say about Subreddits.

> I can't imagine that comes close to covering expenses

That's the fundamental problem with corporate-owned mediums. It is impossible for them to exist long term without being ruined by commercialization because that corporate owner must make a juicy profit sooner or later or else shut it down.

The only viable long term model is decentralization where nobody owns it, so nobody needs to profit from it and the operating costs are shared.

Email (1970s) and Usenet (early 80s) survive in perpetuity because of this (I know most people have forgotten about Usenet but it's still around). It's important to take these lessons to heart. Reinventing yet another proprietary platform with a single corporate owner just to see it inevitably die off when profits must be squeezed is exhausting and a treadmill we should get off of.