I know there was a vote about getting a discord, doesn’t look like it was made, but as someone trying to get going and is very much an amateur, the live-chat in discord would be immensely helpful and ease a lot of frustration.
I think the current Discourse community is a better choice. It is like a database of questions and answers, nicely packaged into topics that are searchable. That is something that can not be done with Discord. I am also on a number of Discord servers and keeping an eye on what is happening is a lot more difficult.
The “live-chat” of a Discord is only working if users that are willing or able to help are online. Same goes for a Discourse community.
Discord does have Forum Channels now which allows for searchable topics and filters. While not as refined for that specifically, the live chat of Discord just provides a much less frustrating approach to problem-solving (given someone is able and willing as you said). Discourse is fine but designed for a much more traditional slow-roll forum approach. I understand the hesitancy for Discord, but with other development groups I’m in that have both Discord and Discourse (or similar), it works quite well.
I can tell there are going to be a number of posts on Discourse eventually regarding running a proxy through NPM. Each person that runs into it will potentially have a slightly nuanced issue, it would be much easier to resolve those quickly with a quick discord message with screenshots, rather than 20 different discourse issues about the same topic.
Thank you for sharing your feedback, Aleks. I completely understand and agree with your point that the live chat offers a less frustrating way to get help for users.
The situation in our case is that our community typically helps with general questions, our developers handle technical inquiries, and our founder is the most frequent responder for self-hosting issues. If we were to use Discord, I don’t think the response time would be significantly shorter, unless we have a dedicated team member to handle this.
Discourse is better for us at this stage because it keeps all the posts organized, making it easier for us to identify which ones require our attention. But I didn’t know Discord now has Forum Channels, and it does look interesting. I will investigate it further, thanks for sharing. 
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We use both Discourse and Discord for our community and it often leads to issues being asked on both and splits the attention of the team and community which doesn’t help anyone.
I would say stick with one of them or if you do start Discord make it clear it isn’t for support 
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