> I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]).

While I understand this preference and am sympathetic to it, I hope this means that you're doing the (heavy, thankless) work to make IRC or mailing lists more reasonably usable for a modern audience on modern devices.

Email's problem is mostly just that email has been rendered almost useless by bad affordances across the board and the general disregard for signal-to-noise, but IRC manages to even be worse. I have a phone in my pocket; I expect continuous connection and history. No, I'm not going to start a bouncer. No, I'm not going to pay somebody else to do it. And no, I'm not going to start a history-archive bot so I can see what I missed.

People moved because these tools are inadequate. Maybe somebody wants to make those tools better, but I don't see it happening at the scales necessary to make these more than but-for complaints.