Admin & sysadmin of a Warframe-focused Lemmy instance at https://dormi.zone.
Developer of a UI mod for Vivaldi Browser: https://github.com/HKayn/vivaldi-vh
It’s because a traditional forum has to be hosted by the project maintainer and then appeal to users enough for them to create an account there.
Compare that to Discord. Most users already have a Discord account and it’s relatively easy to set up a server on there. Plus it happens to be the communication tool for young people.
It makes sense, but it’s sad nonetheless.
Federated?
You’re just throwing together FOSS buzzwords at this point.