Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis
There's one option available to small projects and actually you already named it yourself:
relay bots.
Take for example Nim community. It's not huge by any margin, but we have fairly active forum[0], occasionally active Telegram channel and most of activity is on Discord, IRC and Matrix. I've grouped these three because they're almost seamlessly connected with relay bots into one platform. You can join one of several bridged platforms[1] and talk to everyone on Discord, Gitter, Matrix, etc. with quotes, pings and attachments working as you'd expect them to.
It is certainly an extra burden to moderate and manage all of this, but now you can atleast have an IRC archive[2] that's indexable and searchable [3].
On the other hand, having Discord as your *only* place for discussions is plain stupid (read: foolish). Because I know several people, including myself some years ago, that just 'nope out' from using a project when they see that the only place to get support is a Discord channel.
Comments
It's a tradeoff. The platform is a closed-source silo.
But for a lot of people, it works really well.
I avoided it until eventually one community made me want to be a member.
Those who dislike Discord in that community set up relay bots.
This is a big tragedy that any technical community will suffer from long-term for choosing Discord:
They may cultivate a community, but they will not grow their garden of knowledge.
But to have your resources and attention spread too thin can be devastating, too.
Only huge projects can afford to have multiple Discords, Telegrams, IRCs, Wikis, and not worry too much about the overflow and redundancy.
Small projects like Odin must focus on having a few high-traffic places.
There's one option available to small projects and actually you already named it yourself:
Take for example Nim community. It's not huge by any margin, but we have fairly active forum[0], occasionally active Telegram channel and most of activity is on Discord, IRC and Matrix. I've grouped these three because they're almost seamlessly connected with relay bots into one platform. You can join one of several bridged platforms[1] and talk to everyone on Discord, Gitter, Matrix, etc. with quotes, pings and attachments working as you'd expect them to.
It is certainly an extra burden to moderate and manage all of this, but now you can atleast have an IRC archive[2] that's indexable and searchable [3].
On the other hand, having Discord as your *only* place for discussions is plain stupid (read: foolish). Because I know several people, including myself some years ago, that just 'nope out' from using a project when they see that the only place to get support is a Discord channel.
[0] - https://forum.nim-lang.org/
[1] - https://nim-lang.org/community.html
[2] - https://irclogs.nim-lang.org/30-05-2012.html
[3] - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Airclogs.nim-lang.org...
My hat goes off to you.
And yes, I similarly 'nope out' when I see Matrix. The clients are just terrible.
It’s possible you are running off stale data. At least on mobile, Element X is genuinely good. Element Web/Desktop has improved a lot too.
One word: Discourse.