Yeah everyone here bashing Discord doesn't understand that the voice chat aspect is like 5% of what makes it appealing.
You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space.
If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V.
This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.
I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most.
On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.
Color me skeptical that being able to have a video or an image show up in the chat is what makes a community.
It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the conversation as people post memes instead of saying anything meaningful.
It can also be handy to see the image right there and not have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more seamless and convenient, and is not something that is going to make or break a community.
Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small, even without inline images and video.
This sounds like you're limiting the idea of a "community" to something akin to niche FOSS projects, not generalized interests like Discord is more commonly used for. IRC is way less intuitive for building such things, especially for the vast majority of users - who don't even know what IRC is.
You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not just about the voice chat. It brings the people together in a way they can share rich content in one space.
If you're on voice chat you will very often want to interact with them by sending images, videos or links back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using Ctrl-V.
This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought so.