Refrain is not a platform, nor does it intend to be. While it's fair to compare it with Discord and Teamspeak, these are both fairly large services with a lot of features and a lot of capital behind them. They are both pursuing a platform model (TS does offer a self-hosted option, but it is heavily hamstrung) because that locks their users in and guarantees that sweet annually-recurring revenue.
Platforms are a honeypot, and their bait is features. At their core, Discord and Teamspeak facilitate a community's basic communication needs, but they add little bells and whistles outside of that core that entice people to commit more and more to them. After a certain point, their users are so deeply entrenched in the platform that leaving is impossible. When the platforms inevitably enshittify, these users are simply stuck.
Matching all of these features is not feasible for any project without a sufficiently-large amount of capital, so Refrain will refrain from doing this. Instead, it will focus on the basic needs that all communities have and work to improve the self-hosting features over time.
You don't need to have a jillion emojis or shitty little games in the thing that you use to talk to your friends. You need a tool that makes communication easy.