I did find a wikipedia article to that, and it still seems legitimately more sensible than using Discord for any reason other than gaming-related peer pressure
You are literally doing exactly what the meme was about lol. A discord alternative may simply not be a viable alternative for their needs, if no one is using it.
First of all, public forums are a thing, they work flawlessly and provide information to people without needing to sign in, which is my top issue with Discord. And why I actually want FOSS.
Among other things, some I already mentioned, Discord isn't even all that big, you can say Facebook has 3 bil users, let's all go there.
But the meme is about people who can't escape, avoiding Discord is not only possible, but specifically for support advisable, and I would argue that it's not even that hard.
I personally have used Discord about three times before I just selfhosted Jitsi. Never understood why people want to use it so much. For chat I use Matrix since 2018.
Public forums serve a different purpose to a live chat. Actually what I'm seeing a lot in the comments is people making assumptions about what the purpose of the discord server is, and from those assumptions then conclude that it would be easy to use something else. Some assume that they use it for documentation (???), some assume it's for technical support. But usually what I see, is that these kinds of servers are just an attempt to build a community. And for building a community in the tech space, discord has by far the biggest user base for a chat solution (unless you really think there are more target audience using Facebook messenger, than discord?)
Yeah, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. These individuals annoying people over stuff like this is like trying to criticize a smoker until they quit.
They know open source or free software is supposed to be better for you but there are legitimate reasons to keep using the propertary software.
Also I have no issue with proprietary software so long as they provide a quality service and respect my privacy/rights as a customer. Given an opportunity to pay for good software I always try to, even if the only option is to donate.
Also if you have a fairly big community having a professional team to handle any issues you have in a timely and professional manner is pretty important. I can't tell you how many times I tried to report a bug that makes the software unusable and the maintainer says "huh, what are you talking about." and ghosts me.
Why stop there? Do the open source apps you're advocating run on Windows or Nvidia drivers? You could get upset about them too, because they're also one step removed from something closed source.