Discord hasn’t ever been trying to do what forums do; it’s an evolution of text and voice chat rooms. Discord is for synchronous, live communication, while forums are asynchronous. Information gets lost in synchronous platforms because there’s an inherent assumption that the value of that information is highest in the moment when people are communicating real-time. Getting the 50 message chat history isn’t supposed to be about catching up on what everyone was talking about last week, it’s intended to get you caught up in the conversation that’s happening now. Twitter is the same way. It’s not particularly easy to browse older conversations by design.
It’s possible the format just isn’t for you, but there are a couple things that could help. I think the most important part is finding the right size of community. I personally prefer servers in the range of 50-100 active people. I joined up with one as a part of the Reddit exodus and it quickly grew to 1,000+. Too chaotic for my taste, but I know people who love very active servers like that. Threads are designed to help with the reply problem. A large server that doesn’t permit threads is probably not one you want to be a part of unless it has a mod team that’s very on top of things.
Good channel and role organization is also important, but unfortunately a lot of the good tools are third-party. Because not everyone has the same tools, it can be challenging to find a server that’s well-organized. For example, there a tool that allows people to highlight a specific message, listing a history of selected messages in a non-chat channel. If a server is good at using it, that sort of thing might help you catch up. Another thing we could see soon (if it’s not happening already) is generative AI posting daily summaries of conversations.
It took me a while to get comfortable enough to contribute at will in my favorite Discord servers and not feel like I was interrupting. Cultures vary greatly by server, but no matter the server, there has to be some degree of willingness to jump in.