Thanks for asking @tobiaseigen
In Slack when I spin up a channel for a new project I know the 5-10 people working on it so in the channel config I click on “Add People”, search for them and they are automatically added to the channel.
By contrast in Discourse there is no way to do this. I have to either DM everyone a hashtag for the channel to join or I need to tell them to manually join the channel themselves by browsing channels. In general we’ve found that discoverability of browsing/joining channels is not obvious to many users.
Since Slack is for work environments anyone can add anyone to a channel but since Discourse is more of a public setting and this would be ripe for abuse the ability to add people to channels should be limited to moderators.
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There is a related problem where spinning up private channels based on private categories & group membership is very convoluted / not intuitive. Instead you should just be able to create a channel which is private and add members to it (which is something that both Slack and Discord support).