Some of the best chats I've ever had have been on niche Internet Message Boards using some of the worst technology run by people who didn't understand how to run a website. But the communities were so tight-knit and dedicated to their conversation topic and produced brilliant and entertaining ideas.

And sadly most modern search engines don't rank these conversations highly in searches. There's a treasure trove of unbelievable hidden ideas out there that you'll never come across because search algorithms prioritize garbage, corporate churned content.

Indeed. I think the technology is somewhat orthogonal to the community, but it's the community that's important. A lot of technical people equate the two. (Though there are definitely technical and systemic benefits to more open standards than Discord, even if that doesn't necessarily help the community.)

conversations (in the past) were so much easier to join, find, and review. I wish my company had a bbedit forum instead of slack :)

I find the fact that reddit forces me to use the app on mobile, and not the browser, highly irritating. End of story, I don't go there.

Slide is a great, open source app that works on Android and IOS for reddit just fine. You don't have to use the reddit site or app if you don't want to. But it's fine to skip it too I suppose. I just find it far superior to other social media like twitter, facebook, and instagram. It certainly has it's warts but it is quite easy to simply choose your subset of forums and ignore everything else.

The third party apps are very good though, some even open source.