I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.
However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.
I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.
Even BBSes were filters for people, live chats and group gaming. Digital communications hasn't basically changed at all.
Many discord servers don't even have voice channels and are just collections of text chat channels.