Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.
For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.
For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.
Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.
For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.
For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.