> How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village?

Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small subreddits and you experience it through the prism of old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the algorithmic feed model.

I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to monetize.