thinking about how the biggest thing discord does is make onboarding easy, but noncorporate competitors focus on feature-matching and not ease of:
- hosting
- maintenance
- onboarding
when the thing that will most drive feature development is having people care about your product enough to bring their friends.
as a sidenote I want to point out that discord has perfectly fine¹ communications strata, the issue is half of the actual features are hamstrung by server boosts, where you have to beg members to subscribe to discord nitro plus instead of being able to just pay it yourself². or, yk, have the feature in the app.
Threads are hidden within a day of inactivity without enough boost, so you can't do what some slacks do, which is aggressively thread and only do stray messages if they're new topics. which is great for basically having a digest and only tuning into what you care about.
¹ this is to point out that it's a weakness they've intentionally imposed on themselves that can be capitalized on, not that it's a good app
² this isn't to say I'd want to pay, but at least i wouldn't be emotionally blackmailing my server
