What is known as servers on Discord also exists on Matrix. They are called spaces and you don’t need to self-host a Matrix server to create a space. There’s also no significant learning curve, you just download Element (the most popular Matrix client), create an account and you ready to go. You can join spaces or groups from any Matrix server or message anyone on the network. Chats also make use of end-to-end encryption by default and it can even be activated for groups (wouldn’t make much sense for public groups though).
it must be doing something right in terms of being sustainable
They’re basically living off of investor money and selling user data. The former is not an indefinite solution though. And Discord Nitro is a fucking joke, the revenue generated from it will never cover the operational costs.
Matrix is a much better solution, it uses peer-to-peer technology (matrix.org/blog/2020/…/introducing-p2p-matrix/) to reduce the burden of operational costs on the team. It’s also federated, just like Lemmy, meaning anyone can host their own Matrix server and communicate with users on other servers. Running Matrix at home or on a VPS is even easier than self-hosting Lemmy. It’s also completely free and open-source and allows everyone to write their own clients. Discord on the other side is a piece of proprietary garbage/spyware and bans everyone who attempts to use a custom client. I will never understand why so many people like Discord.
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
You can use Startpage to get Google search results. It’s a meta search engine for Google, but it doesn’t expose any of your data. You can use it with DuckDuckGo’s Bangs feature. That way, DuckDuckGo can be your default search engine and you can make all of your normal search queries with DDG, but if you want to search on Google through Startpage, you just type !sp followed by your search query into DuckDuckGo and it will forward your search to Startpage. This also works with many many other sites, type !bangs into DDG to get the full list of supported websites.