This is actually a really good point. I will update the 2nd order effects part of the post accordingly. Here are my thoughts on that:
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Discord had deemed the new forum feature as an experiment for well over a year. It was initially only available to very large communities (100k members up). They kept fine-tuning it and eventually added it to more and more server. Now they have officially launched it as a general feature for everyone and removed the “experiment” status. I think they are committed to it. They use it on their own servers.
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Discord doesn’t have a real track record of abandoning features. The only big thing they ever removed was their integrated game store (where they tried to compete with Steam etc.).
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But in the end, we can’t know for certain and it is definitely a risk, albeit a small one IMO.
This is the problem with “vendor lockin”. With something like Discouse, which is open source and very popular, the risk is much smaller. And even if Discourse would end development, there are plenty of other forum platforms that can import Discourse data. I am not sure we would have that kind of fallback if Discord would ever shut down the forum feature. The potential risk there is that we would lose all forum data forever.