I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.

I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.

Better question would be “when the last time you googled something without prefixing it with ‘reddit’ to get good results” 🤭

online communities seemed to be going to discord

That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.