Stop using Discord. It is a discriminatory/exclusionary, unsafe, censored platform.
https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/
For example, I would be participating, but Discord's censorship and discrimination says that I can't unless I show ID; resultantly I'm not in your chat even though I'd like to be. How many others are affected similarly?
More examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22384356
Wow didn’t think of that. We’re moving as fast as we can to launch OpenLink which will have encrypted chat and group chat and once we do we want to mainly use that. Other suggestions?
I would suggest running your own instance of Mattermost. Depending on your userbase, IRC on a channel on an existing public network (OFTC or Freenode) might work, although Freenode has been known to engage in censorship pretty heavily sometimes.
Lots of people, including Mozilla, seem to like and use Matrix, as implemented by Synapse.
The bottom of my linked post (keep scrolling) has specific recommendations for alternatives.
Cool thanks
If you fire up a VPS somewhere and install CapRover (pretty easy for even someone virtually nontechnical), I recently contributed a config for Mattermost to the CapRover "one click apps" repository, which does just what it says on the tin: a single click to deploy your own Mattermost instance. (My config even turns off the on-by-default Mattermost server spyware, so you're private-by-default.)
https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/public/v2/apps/mattermost.json
Drop me a line if you need help setting it up.