So I finally clicked on the link in #Global that says "Click here to join the Foldit Discord server!"
I see the login page. It says at 11PM CDT that 268 people are online, and that there are 2,691 members.
How is that possible? There are never more than about a hundred people that ever play a puzzle, and there are less than two thousand "active" players.
Just who is in this channel? I'm not sure I want to see hundreds of people talking all at once.
The Discord membership includes everyone who ever has signed up for the Foldit Discord, whether or not they actually have posted a message there. (We typically get 2-4 people each day who sign up to Discord, most of who are "read only" participants and don't post – they can post, they just typically don't.)
Likewise, the number of "online" people is everyone who has ever signed up for Foldit Discord and who currently has a Discord client open. Most of those people are either participating in Discord servers for other games (not necessarily Foldit), or are just hanging out in a read-only capacity.
By far the busiest channels in Discord are the #global and #veteran channels, and that's primarily because of the mirroring to the regular in-game Foldit IRC channels. If you're not overwhelmed by the rate of chat in the in-game chat channels, you certainly won't be overwhelmed by the chat in the other Discord channels.
Good to know Discord is for more then just Foldit. The wonky statistics confused me.
Maybe I'll still check it out, as long as it doesn't ask for too much personal information.
Cased closed. Thank you, rmoretti, for clarifying.