This a good point that I hadn't considered. At least in my experience, DMs are a useful but secondary feature that mostly are useful because it's not uncommon to make connections with people from interacting in the servers themselves. I had been mentally modeling Discord as a chat app, but in a lot of ways it feels more accurate to think of it almost like Facebook with just groups and DMs, only the groups are realtime chat. Over that years I've heard various people talk about using only groups and maybe events as the last things they still used Facebook for, and I deactivated my account years ago but still use Messenger because of the years of contacts I had already built up on it (and the fact that it still is possible to use with a deactivated Facebook account), which provides at least some anecdotal evidence that Discord is basically providing the stickiest features of Facebook.