I'm going to respectfully disagree. IRC was essentially the same as Discord, but without the bells and whistles (Skype is terrible, though). That being said, I used IRC, AIM, and MSN for years to communicate with others, across a wide variety of time zones, including the UK and Australia, and the eastern US for that matter. Being on the West Coast doesn't always make the timing right for me to have conversations with people in this country, but I managed on IRC, and now on Discord. The point, though, the chat systems are functional, and they can work.
I do agree that the forums have helped in the past, I always advocated for forums. But, I disagree that Discord has killed forums, or anything like that. Forum usage had been down for a while. That's part of why I never came home to stay before. There wasn't consistent activity on the forum that I could see that would be easy to start participating in, maybe just some spam games, I was still logged into IRC but it was mostly not used, Skype was sort of used, and the RMB was difficult to break into, even for me, and sometimes what I saw was not what I remembered this region to be.
But, anyways, I do think the forum and Discord can coexist, just the same way forum and IRC did for so long.