Thanks for the input and clarification. Yes, Facebook has a different culture. And rightfully also the algorithms to make sure people see content they probably like instead of a linear timeline of everything posted. But that puts you in competition with lolcats and girls in bikinis so to speak. Things that aren’t necessary act as a supporting platform to have focused discussions.
So yes, technically they are similar. But the forum offers more focus and makes sure people get the info they subscribed for. There are a lot of Facebook Groups. None of them you can control in a unified way. Content also has to be manually re-posted across all those groups. I’ve done it, it’s a a pain. Just like having all those Discord servers, which then also have many channels. Your screenshot and motivation around it make it seem you have the impression everything is reachable and organized. I strongly disagree. I only have 4 servers in my Discord and I can’t make any sense out of it.
Here we have the groups and users which you can directly tag or DM. Also a map of where these chapters are geographically. In a previous comment I also addressed the latest and top filters which allow a nice overview. Saving time and effort to keep up.
If you want easy access, you may like the PWA (Progressive Web App), it functions as an app on your phone or computer. Just like any other app. It’s simple to install. The app offers push notifications to your phone (not as emails). Only if you don’t react to those notifications you then receive an email by default, this can be modified as well.
Those numbers you list of social-media pages, forum groups and group chats are impressive. But those numbers need to be taken into perspective. Sure active users is always lower. But also, what’s the effective reach? The Facebook posts sometimes only get a few dozen likes, sometimes even less. Liking is of course not the same as seeing and reading the post, but it’s a more accurate indication than Facebook’s interpretation of “reading”. And Discord has many users. But anyone that joins is listed as a member. Even if those people then just spend their time in another server, they’re still registered as “online” in the TZM Discord. So I think we should take those online and membership numbers with a grain of salt.
Here are some stats from the forum, with also the context. People come and watch, but don’t interact as much unfortunately. Also note the web crawlers, very useful to spread the train of thought. And this is also a yearly overview, so it’s normalized, some spikes in user activity is not visible because it’s normalized with inactive days. Quarterly and weekly overviews show these spikes better.
Moderation is easier here as well. Trust levels, (real) AI for detecting toxic language (not just a word list), a custom word list is possible though and customize some rules for that, and many, many more. When people reach higher trust levels they automatically become soft moderators as well. So as the forum grows, it automatically recruits people into a (soft) mod role. And people can flag posts as well. You also have the option of “canned replies”, which you can use for recurring interventions, saving you a lot of typing. The list is long, but I suppose you get the impression. You can do more with less on the forum.
A workshop about how to use the forum? I did that in the beginning with a bunch of people. The next step would then be the moderation course, which is in the Staff category, but yeah, only visible for staff 
We never got that far.
That’s a bad thing? I think it’s more healthy and promotes more substance in the comments. While also being able to link easily to other threads, topics, categories and tags to save time and explaining thins again.
Thanks again for your feedback!