I still remember when Discord was primarily a voice chat (later, with screen sharing features too), essentially a replacement for TeamSpeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, not IRC or XMPP MUC.
Looks like those days it's more of a Slack/Gitter/IRC alternative.
I struggle to use Discord precisely because of the UX. and I say that with years of IRCing in a terminal with a black background. I vastly prefer Slack's theme.
Discord's dark & light themes are too hard on my eyes. They feel like the designers have never worked on a 13" MBP and only large monitors w/ non-retina displays.
But unfortunately it is highly censored. And if you're part of any community that is banned, your account is banned as well. It happens often. Something I experienced, as a former member of a nootropics server.
I don't find the service very trustworthy, but I think that if you're a gamer, it may work out just fine for you.
All the topics mentioned in this subthread sound like my kind of thing. It's sad that Discord bans for that.
If you ever want to resume your communities elsewhere, perhaps check out Matrix (https://matrix.org/)? If you have the know how to host your own server, you can host a community without the risk of being shut down by an external party. People from other servers can still join because the network is federated.
I agree that I wish their rules were more lax, but a trust and safety ban of a server doesn't necessarily ban everyone from the server. Just recently a server I was in got a trust and safety ban and no one got banned. The server just disappeared.
The only time I've does this it turned out that a feature didn't exist to do what I wanted, but you must admit the UX of creating a new IRC server is a million times worse than creating a new discord server.