Yeah, I've only seen cohost mentioned in lists of places people might move too, which in my experience isn't a good sign - new sites tend to need to have something to offer other than not being the old site, if they're really going to take off.
I can get you an invite to the Cranky Old Fans discord, which is the one that eased me into figuring out discord, if you'd like. It was the perfect level of activity for me to figure out how Discord chat works and I suspect you'd fit into our niche! :D (It's got a lot of DW people on it.) Discord is in practice more asynchronous than IRC, at least in the not-huge groups - I've seen it described as chatrooms that think they're forums, or possibly forums that think they're chatrooms, which seems about right. IT's pretty normal to carry on a conversation over the course of one post every few hours, or reply to something posted several days ago, on most of my discords.
But you're right that the closed aspect makes it hard to find a place where you do fit. I spent several years not figuring it out until I managed to stumble into invites to a few smaller ones that worked for me, and I have no idea how you make that work if you don't already have a starting point on other social media.
(Oh, if you don't have a namesquat on Reddit yet, that might be worth at least squatting. It is among other things a good place to find fandom Discord invites, and there's a lot of tiny communities for tiny fandoms that are pretty active and not awful; I got active there when I got into a book fandom where that was the only public place with people. And then someone on Reddit gave me an invite to the discord and I wandered out of the Reddit...)
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I can get you an invite to the Cranky Old Fans discord, which is the one that eased me into figuring out discord, if you'd like. It was the perfect level of activity for me to figure out how Discord chat works and I suspect you'd fit into our niche! :D (It's got a lot of DW people on it.) Discord is in practice more asynchronous than IRC, at least in the not-huge groups - I've seen it described as chatrooms that think they're forums, or possibly forums that think they're chatrooms, which seems about right. IT's pretty normal to carry on a conversation over the course of one post every few hours, or reply to something posted several days ago, on most of my discords.
But you're right that the closed aspect makes it hard to find a place where you do fit. I spent several years not figuring it out until I managed to stumble into invites to a few smaller ones that worked for me, and I have no idea how you make that work if you don't already have a starting point on other social media.
(Oh, if you don't have a namesquat on Reddit yet, that might be worth at least squatting. It is among other things a good place to find fandom Discord invites, and there's a lot of tiny communities for tiny fandoms that are pretty active and not awful; I got active there when I got into a book fandom where that was the only public place with people. And then someone on Reddit gave me an invite to the discord and I wandered out of the Reddit...)