Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.

The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.

Wire exists.

Obviously the problem isn't you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it's a forum, dispatcharr for example "oh do you want support? Join our discord". Fine, I'll figure it out myself.

My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren't used, and one of the channels is to share links.