>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
> You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
It however brings disadvantages with it. Specifically if now instead of a forum you have to join five trillion discord servers just to get help with your one issue on "this niche product i use".
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.
These are just network effects.
I don't think it's necessary "welcomed by all actors involved". For sure most smaller discord servers don't want to be public, but then this change doesn't affect them anyhow. It would be nice, in some cases (like a discord server that is the main support channel for an application) to have that more indexable and searchable by others.