@hendrik@zexu I believe that Rochko (spelling?) foresaw his software being run on many small instances versus several large players. Hence that is why I think scalability wasn't an emphasis at the time. From the little I understand of Ruby is that it doesn't scale very well. I think the idea behind Sidekiq is to mitigate that problem.
Sure. I'm always kinda uncertain why people ask for libre software and then not want it for the same things i like about it. If you want something plug and play and decentralization isn't important to you: Maybe you don't need an alternative and Discord is the right thing for you.
Otherwise it's not the software (architecture), you just want to go to an existing instance and let someone else do the self-hosting for you.