Not OP, but I’ll answer from my own perspective. Note that Discord terminology can be a bit weird, since a server is just a unique shared group space, but hopefully makes sense.
So you can:
- Have private chats with one or multiple individuals.
- Start audio or video calls through those chats, and screen share/stream in them.
- I’ll also mention the ability to send not just text, but images, videos, embedded GIFs, files, so on.
- in servers you get the same thing, broken into text and voice channels (the latter allowing the full range of audio, video, and screen share).
- in servers each user can be given roles to determine which channels they can see and use, or edit, among various other permissions.
- Pinned messages, @ mentions for roles.
- Though I don’t use it much anymore, the option to effectively subscribe to a channel on another server to have messages from there propagate over (e.g.: a uni club server announces an event and you see it on another server in an events channel)
- also servers don’t have any upper limits on members, at least not one I’ve ever seen hit
- Bot integration via API.
- oh, also it all works on desktop or mobile (because it’s mostly just a web app, but still)
And key thing is: all very easy to get started with, whether you’re just wanting to join a server, or start an entire community.
Big deal for my uses currently is voice chat and screen share in one place, while still being able to organise stuff into separate channels, pin messages in them, etc.
I think right now if I had to replace it, assuming I could get the people I interact with off (which is either 20 or 1500 people, depending on how much I’d want to carry with me), it’d have to be a mix of Matrix/Stoat and probably Steam’s built-in features. Maybe a classic forum. That is, if I wanted to have all the features I use. I could do with less, but it’s frustrating.
I think the alternatives will get there eventually, self-hosted even, but self-hosting also has a hardware cost.
That said, I really don’t know why software stuff was ever moved on discord. My uses are gaming and university community-related.