I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.)

We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.

Is that a reasonable compromise?

[0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com

It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the data ownership problem. It's not federated, still centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it)

My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community discussion, and technical support. There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just archived to my local machine.