I’m a huge fan of Discourse for the very reason discussed –
- data ownership by community leaders and not by the platform (Discourse communities can easily migrate to self-hosting or even other platforms)
- users’ ease of access in exporting their own data
But I was surprised that neither of these Discourse features seems to be mentioned in the blog post 
For example, Discord etc doesn’t even have the ability to export your community’s data. When someone deletes their server, no one has access to any of their own content, and you can’t keep a backup of the server anywhere to be able to restore it again one day. And on other platforms, if you want to request your data, you have to write and ask for it – there’s no automated process.
On Discourse, you can export your whole forum in a backup archive and then easily restore it at any time. You can also use migration scripts to restore the data on another forum platform too if you wish.
And users can easily get an export of their own posts in CSV on Discourse without waiting for any staff member to reply.
These features are Discourse’s greatest features on this topic of discussion – so I think it would be great to see more elaboration on them in this blog post too, or a future one.