It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.
Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
> What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
IRC was always an alternative/replacement for forums for many people (there was always the IRC vs forums debate for projects, gaming teams, etc.). Discord is just better IRC (Slack would have been this without the self sabotage via limited free accounts and sleeping on voice chat for years). Now it's more... Discord vs Reddit. But think of all the lost lore on those IRC servers or random private forums that are now gone.
> Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
Server owners have the option for message logging bots. If communities wanted logging, they do have that option with server owner buy-in.
Arguably, difficult-to-archive by default if you aren't a server owner helps foster a safer chat experience.
In Matrix there is an awful "threaded discussions" feature now, where collapsed forks branch off from the main chat flow. Which you have to separately manage. Keep a chat a chat, and a forum a forum.
That part is such a joke. I routinely run into the problem that I can't send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES. In 2023. And Discord insists on storing the bit-perfect copies of original images and videos too to add to the insult. I would be perfectly fine with them being compressed and/or stored temporarily but nah. I have to resort to cloud storage services like Yandex disk to go around that asinine limitation.
Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.
So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.
LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.
Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.
There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.
In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.
This is correct. Google became a monopoly and they stopped caring about surfacing any results that they couldn't immediately monetize. If your content is archived in a forum somewhere, Google won't find it anyway, it'll instead show you results from youtube, ads, and whatever is on top of their cache. Search is effectively dead, so we have to resort to asking other humans directly for answers. Which sucks, but that's the phase of the competition/monopoly cycle that we're in right now.
Cynically speaking, platforms like Discord are not interested in their content being widely searchable. If a,user can satisfy their need for information by reading an existing answer (even within Discord), that user needs Discord less. The user depends less on there being an active community in Discord members of which could provide answers.
This all likely means fewer paying subscribers.
So, Discord search should be fine for a few months depth, and need not be good further into the past. Exposing historical data to external search engines is even less desirable.
Same of course applies to Slack, HipChat and whatever other commercial chat-like software.
I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable. If slack created some awesome feature that mined your company's chat logs to train something like the Librarian in Snow Crash that would be a massive selling point even if it means fewer chats between human beings. It's s valuable because it produces an answer without taxing another human.
> it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else
I join a discord channel and honestly most of the time I’m overwhelmed. There’s often a ton of sub channels for every specific thing… that aren’t very active. It’s hard to get a feel for what is going on.
I join some only to find everyone is annoyed by my elementary question, but hell if I can find any answers in discord.
I just never know the lay of the land.
The handful of highly active people do, but that’s it.
Yup - the most engaged members are usually running the server, so they optimise it for their use. Multiple channels and categories make it easy to remember context if you switch often, and prevent recent relevant conversations from going out of scope too quickly.
Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things
I'm not sure Discord is necessarily good for "gaming communities". I mean, Discord is live chat. This is good for some aspects: match making, news, etc. - anything that has a short lifespan. However, a lot of things about games don't. Wikis are perfect for publishing this info. Think of a Street Fighter type game. Characters have their move set, that doesn't change. Imagine having to search through discord for how to do a fireball with Ryu. Then there's strategy - that changes, albeit periodically, after tournaments, etc. By all means, this stuff can be discussed in discord, but the consensus strategies have to be published because it's a terrible experience to search through chat logs and follow along with long finished conversations over who knows how many posts, figure out context, etc. compared to just reading it on a wiki.
I see Discord being used for things where forums (and non realtime conversations) used to rule supreme, like hobbies, tutorials, etc.
Why? A tutorial is not a real time chat. A showcase of hobby projects isn't a real time conversation either. And the searchability of these tools like Discord is terrible. I really don't understand why this terrible thing became popular.
Those communities iirc nowadays operate a dual mediawiki + discord server. Dustloop (arcsys, Guilty Gear & BlazBlue mostly) for example didn't vanish entirely to Discord, the discord is instead just used to organize edits to the wiki if I recall.
Discord is absolutely terrible at storing semi-structured information like a wikipage and I don't see them fix that without completely overhauling their entire service (although I'm sure they'll try and muck up the death of publicly available knowledge even more).
I guess I should be clearer - I'm more referring to multiplayer communities rather than actual game-specific resources. Communities, rather than knowledge resources, are where it's appropriate, basically. Of course, these often end up bleeding into eachother over time.
What's far more unsettling is knowing that Discord's sysadmins, as well as their acquirer (which for a minute looked like it might have been MSFT) have the complete plaintext logs of every DM conversation. Every private link, every NDA'd product info, every insider crypto tip, all the passwords and credentials, all the sexting, all the nudes.... and all linked to your real world identity via the non-VoIP phone number you have to add to your account to join most channel groups ("servers").
The trove of blackmail and extortion data alone is worth a few dozen millions. The insider crypto trading that Discord makes possible is worth probably $20-50mm USD each month.
And the mundane reality is that they won't use it for blackmail or in any such personalized fashion (except for government requests). What they will use it for, is training language models. That's the new way of monetizing "user-generated content", especially one you've managed to lock up so it can't be casually scrapped by anyone else.
One of Discord's shareholders is Tencent (not Microsoft!!), however, the co-founders are still on the board and are highly occupied with day to day stuff. Message deletion on Discord is traceless from the outset (once deleted, no one, not even database admins, can retrieve deleted messages; the same thing also applies to the metadata, but not messages, of deleted users), in fact, this is one of the features they are bragging with. Traceless deletion is verified by both engineering related blogposts and interactions with support.
Unfortunately, even the LLVM community has chosen a combination of Discord/Discourse, and deprecated their mailing list/IRC channel. This is a very unhealthy trend, and only the most ardent of communities such as Linux/Git/GCC stick to old-fashioned publicly-archived mailing lists.
Most of German immigration information and advice is locked into private Facebook groups. This information is not good nor reliable, but it's the only way to tell how things actually play out at the immigration office, for example.
That information would serve a lot more people if it was available to them with a simple search.
indeed very disappointing that most games have wikis/subreddits where one can get the gist of it served in a consumer friendly format but public services do not
Reddit is still bad, not only because it's a platform, but also because it tends to lock threads after merely a couple of months (which prevents necroposting, which sometimes IS the right thing to do, while creating a new post is the wrong one) - so even if someone comes in later with a solution, they can't even answer the previous posters !
(and some of the new forums, seems like Discourse has it on by default?)
Discord is nice because it lets you have small talk and build strong communities with a more natural cadence. In the same way we don't record every spoken conversation, I think we don't need to stress about discord going missing. I imagine any historically relevant outcomes of conversations on discord will be recorded outside of discord.
All that said, it's still important to have knowledge bases to reference I agree, but I think that should be an effort separate to Discord. I wouldn't want to search an arbitrarily long chat log to find answers to questions, it's not well suited for the task.
I would say in something like speedrunning there is tons of information that only exists in discord pinned threads etc., and in the combined heads of community members.
To those who care about that hobby a lot of very useful information would vanish if discord went away. That's not a great state of affairs and discord is a very bad place to keep that information, even at the best of times it's not easy to find things in there. But I think it's probably the case for a decent number of communities.
You could definitely argue that it's not historically relevant, since, if speedrunning as a whole disappeared it wouldn't really matter.
I will say what I feel like I say whenever this comes up: Discord could contribute to a solution here, even partially, by making Discord Forums search indexable. It would (theoretically) help with the "has my question been answered before" and it would (theoretically) make (some) archival efforts simpler.
I discovered one years ago that Facebook had a trove of useful technical groups that are completely invisible because they are not indexable. I wonder how much knowledge we have lost because of discord and FB are the new forum
I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.
We've had the same thing happen with a local gaming club - we've pretty much wholesale moved from Facebook to Discord. Which is great for current members, but makes recruiting (which is sort of important in a college town) next to impossible.
> It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers
Not just on Discord, in general, everywhere: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and even here HackerNews.
It's not just about being searchable or long-lived, but that they can pull the rug anytime (or make stealth edits like the Reddit fiasco with their admin Spez)
How to solve this? Should the burden of searchability and archival be a requirement upon companies that provide social media services? Third-party bots already manually crawl all services and provide external search/archive interfaces (like the "Reddit Undelete" services) How to make that better?
I'd be happy even if they just didn't hijack Command/Ctrl-F. You can't even search for text on the screen you're viewing without being dumped into their shitful pseudosearch.
And you can't even filter out spammy channels like bot command channels. On mobile it's particularly awful where if you look for a message's context, it's very likely you'll lose your "place" in the search panel and have to scroll from the top all over.
IRC used to be indexed by Google and such though. Also because irc clients didn't have rich media support a lot of knowledge would make it outside of IRC like code snippets or microblogs that would eventually get indexed.
I'd say it's a symptom of how toxic the public internet (especially Twitter) has become. When there is an angry mob constantly scouring every community for transgressions (real or imagined), being unindexed and unsearchable is a feature not a bug.
That is if you get support at all. Many times I have not. At least on an issue tracker I can find other people who might have solved a similar problem on their own.
> more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before
It becomes painfully obvious and a little funny when the question triggers a bot to reply with a link to a pinned comment answering FAQ#36, and you see it happen a dozen times a day.
I wonder if setting up a discourse instance is too much of a friction that businesses are instead choosing a real-time chat inspite of it being awful for knowledge sharing as a whole.
May be there's a need-gap for a low friction forum.
Even more unsettling, when you realise there must be a lot of children talking to a lot of adults, about who knows what, on discords invisible to parents and police.
The search is per-server so before you even start you need to know which server has the thing you're looking for, which isn't always obvious, and you can't search a server without actively joining it, announcing your presence and using up your finite server slots. There's no equivalent to Googling something and passively pulling answers from wherever.
Unless i'm missing something (and noting the drawbacks mentioned elsewhere re. no google search), its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness. You can't think of some set of terms and have it bring up a particular thing, you have to know an exact word used in it.
This means you need to know enough already just to get it to come up, and more to prune out the other 500 results if your term is generic enough. Basically, the search only really works if you want to find a specific conversation you remember (and it better be recent, given how easily you forget the specifics of things as time passes)
Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.
The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.
Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.
But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).
It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks.
I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.
I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever.
Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.
>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server
Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s).
> People need to learn how to adapt.
They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.
Discord is huge with the kids today. I saw my nephew kept checking his phone and like a typical old fart I challenged him and asked what the hell he's checking. Turns out it's discord. He subscribes to channels on discord, some are read-only, just a way of distributing notifications.
The draw is the single sign on. You sign on to one simple service and you have all your friends, all the games you follow, all the groups.
Why does Discord even care if you're discussing/distributing cheats, so long as you obey the law? Who exactly is the Trust & Safety team supposed to serve?
DMCA takedown notices take up employee time, so maybe they formed this team to preemptively shut down anything that looks like it might cause DMCA notices to come in.
You lost me at GitHub : sure, the public part of it is being crawled, but it's still a platform (and a Microsoft-owned one to boot !), so if you care about the Web or libre software, you should stay the hell out of it, regardless of the sub-feature you use.
What in the nine hells is "cub content"? Are we talking about drawn pictures of animals or actual bestiality? One of these is illegal, and the other is... what like Fievel Mousekewitz goes wild?
I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?
Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed?
The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
I think it is purely a technology problem. Discord software is good and for text/voice chat nothing really compares to the ease of use, features and ecosystem around it.
I do. Hence why my discord persona is essentially made up and used as a marketing tool for my artsy hobbies, same way as my instagram profile is carefully curated to be something I'm not.
Yes, but also no. Each time Microsoft slips, you do see the waves of folks migrating and a lot of big projects—like KDE, GNOME, Freedesktop—have moved elsewhere since ’16. My concern is more on the education side where schools are starting kids on the proprietary service and YouTube ‘gurus’ saying you need it which might make its growth outpace folks leaving after all these the outages, or some new EEE initiative, etc. that have historically caused migrations. The other concern is communities that have used Microsoft GitHub IDs for identity in the community (i.e. Elm requires all public packages are published to Microsoft GitHub and your user ID is the an identifier, Nixpkgs requires the ID for its maintainers.nix, Unison Share accounts requires sign-ins via Microsoft GitHub, etc.).
While I totally disagree with the forced proprietary collaboration (need an account & can’t contribute without, nor can you self-host or fork to fix the platform) of Microsoft GitHub, at least unlike the Discord situation it is search indexable, reading doesn’t require an account or JavaScript, and is strictly public communication (no DMs floating around). Once you start buying into the larger platform though, the corner for yourself has been painted in—but that’s not to say you couldn’t have mirror that accepts merge requests without an account or still have a mailing list/inbox to mail patches to. (But, like, just set up your project elsewhere in the first place and stop playing into a social media platform masquerading as a code forge—as well as let folks sign up with email or WebFinger)
You are requiring users sign up for an account on a proprietary, closed-source, for-profit server. All metadata will flow through this entity and whoever they choose to share or sell this data to. Many rooms demand SMS verification which will often leak who you are and prevent anonymity. Chat platforms also include DMs and smaller group chats for private conversations around projects and there is no E2E so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord. Users must also agree to the ToS set by Discord—not your community—which can change and go against the community wishes. They also have the maximum authority to just axe your community by shutting down its chatroom (it’s not a “server”) if a bad apple breaks those ToS.
This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information.
I often like to tag people so that it is unambiguous which "Alex" I am referring to and avoids me misspelling the names. But often I don't need to bother people. It would be nice if I could link to the user without notifying them.
> Our largest community has seen over 180,0000 Google impressions
Is that 180,000 or 1,800,000?
Apart from that, it looks really good! As I understand it, you actually cache all those conversations, right? So basically, it's like mailing-list archives, but for discord and slack; even if the servers go down or get closed or threads are deleted or move somewhere else, the content on your site stays up?
I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did.
It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me.
I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.
I don't use my real phone number for foreign data selling companies so I use SMS verification services.
Your situation explains why my accounts always get suddenly banned after a while without information. You can't get around the number thing usually, but having a number that works is not enough appearantly
Discord's policies are frankly absurd. I'm pretty sure that at one point, if not now, they suggest using a friend's phone to verify your account if you're prompted to provide a phone number. Discord is too big now to excuse such careless behavior.
I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects.
I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers.
Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there
This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking!
> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.
Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!
> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.
Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!
> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.
Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.
There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.
It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge".
For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.
This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours.
This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.
> In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions
It's doubly hard when you had a private chat with someone who got laid off. For some reason Slack makes such accounts/chat history really hard to browse once some time has passed. And sometimes you have valuable information in your chat history with that person!
> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk.
>
> The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution.
>
> Two thoughts:
>
> It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been
working pretty well for about 4 billion years.
>
> It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria.
>
>It's not working so well today either.
>
> We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media.
If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.
Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.
That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA datacenter has only a fraction of the claimed capacity and they used the secrecy to embezzle funds on top of the overpaid contracts to Quislings. Because that is what authoritarians do to buy loyalty.
After all their nominal function is to prevent terrorism by sorting through needle stacks many months after the fact. Failure just means more chances to attack encryption again!
This is the problem of the shitweb. Shitweb being a concern from law enforcement agencies regarding the difficulties to capture and analyze internet activities that are buried in pictures with text, video, hyperlocal cultural language (think l33tspeak) and temporal communications. The size of the datacentre likely won't help much.
(Tried to find a link to the definition of shitweb, wow not a great search)
I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of.
Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.
While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.
Its good to remember that oral traditions have been (and still are) huge part of humanity; in many ways discord can be seen as internet iteration of that age old part of culture.
If we are going to supplant oral traditions with a massive disconnected worldwide web (sometimes of lies), and replace learned knowledge with 'googling' as a skill- whats the harm in trying to 1. make technologies that will protect the information, or 2. generate a culture of preservation to protect such information.
There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.
I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.
I'm actually looking for something like this. Discourse pricing seems to be around $100 per month minimum for a group of 500? It's a huge leap from the forums where minimum cost is about $8/month.
I don't like it. It works poorly without JavaScript, but this isn't quite the main problem. The main problem is that it seems to have the same sterile look everywhere just like every single "modern" corporate site, the same as new design reddit, facebook, or goolag, or anything else.
That’s because forums are themselves an abomination, just create a newsgroup in the `alt.*` hierarchy or set up a mailing list and be done. Just because you insist on using a web browser to access it doesn’t mean everyone should have to. You can use a web-based client and others can use native clients and nobody is locked out.
Newsgroups have obnoxious hierarchal branching replies, unlike any normal human conversation, unlike what forums do, and they lack lots of minor forum features.
You need a unique login for every forum, notifications are a mess and usually via email, the UIs are poor and difficult to use, every forum usually has a different theme with different locations for buttons and settings, there's no real time way to communicate so everything takes forever, and everyone has stupid profile footers in their posts that make you scroll twice as much as you should have to.
There are also bugs like quoting a post that has images reposts all of the images again and creates even more pointless scrolling. Or forums that lack even basic image resizing so someone uploads their 24MP photos and it goes way off the side of the screen and makes the post take ages to load.
I'm sure it could all be fixed somehow, but current stuff is just awful and I absolutely dislike interacting with forums.
I've found many useful threads and answers for some super niche and obfuscated stuff on Gitter where you get some discord like benefits (better irc) and is indexed by engines. I liked their model where you can have rooms for topics, repos etc but shame it's hardly used.
Take a look at Groups.io: You can set up a group with both a mailing list and a forum for free, for up to a certain size, and then it’s some minimum price and $0.04/month per user for all the feature.
What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake?
Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.
Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way.
As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.
This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.
I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only.
It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users.
That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform.
My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups.
It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.
I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned.
Worse are open source communities only using Slack.
As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money.
Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.
The free version is unfortunately hobbled but slack is a lot better than discord at least at critical things like "getting caught up on messages that were sent since you last read." Some friends and I recently started a discord server for an async D&D game and it's a real pain to get caught up. They have the same red "you were here" line and the same "X new messages" banner as slack, but discord's default scrolling behavior works against you.
I don't know if it's as true these days but in the early days you couldn't get Discord installed on office computers because of the association that it was a "gaming app".
I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.
The age old question between convenience and safety.
Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.
Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it.
Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit.
Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.
Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this.
90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.
I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.
> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.
I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults.
Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.
Agreed. Frankly, the chamber is itself a problem. The community is just a nicer name for a tribe you currently subscribe to. It is downright folksy. I don't automatically mind, but there is no reason to pretend otherwise.
Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.
More like Death of Internet as we used to know it.
Imagine a tranquil and secluded nature reserve [internet] that attracts like-minded people [nerds/geeks/tech enthusiasts] seeking peace and tranquillity. But with the addition of an airport, a nearby suburban development and a sprawling ski resort, the once idyllic space has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub, unrecognisable from its former state. Although you still venture into the park, it feels like a different place altogether, leaving you with a sense of isolation and disconnection.
I'm afraid that the next thing we'll see is AI that creates content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content completely taking over online discourse and social media, together with entire fake personas. Why? Sales & Marketing.
This is happening elsewhere too - all kinds of traditional forums for hardware, be it cars laptops or watches have now almost entirely moved to Facebook groups, only the biggest communities still hang around and even then just barely, with a shadow of their former selves. And Facebook is even worse than discord, with absolutely abysmal search and very few tools to engage with your community effectively. But it's easy to join so a lot of people prefer it.
I am on so Discords, but whenever I come across an Open Source project that uses it as sole form of support/discussion, I move on and look for an alternative.
It is just not useful at all for any kind of documentation/reference, but also for support: if it’s a reasonably popular project and you’re not on the same time zone, you will never be able to see any replies at all.
Sometimes I can't ask a question to a open source project because they decided to move everything to discord and lock it behind a account verification that needs a phone number I am not willing to put there (or rather don't have)
I literally use less promising products sometimes just because they not yet moved everything to discord
My company, a FAANG, went from having all our documentation in a wiki that is searchable by anyone, to heavily using Quip (some sort of Google Docs).
Engineers resisted for a while because it's obviously awful for documentation. You can't even search it AT ALL. But since all the non-technical staff had an easier life editing Quip than editing the Wiki it's now the defacto solution for all.
This is going to be doom of engineering at this company. Over the years I have found countless things on random wikis from random teams that helped me achieve my own solution. Quip destroyed that.
Reading your Tell made me realize something – I just don’t really google things anymore or look for answers online. Either read the official docs or ask the resident expert in my company for help.
SO feels increasingly less fitting as my problems become more niche and discord et al are flooded with newbies who can’t help me. Or it would take so long to even explain my problem that there’s no way a chat has the attention span required.
It's basically true. I get the best support from some official Discords... A lot of it is from just searching and some is from just posting a question. It would be a pity if it were to just go away and never be recorded for all the smart answers would be lost.
That certainly is a unique ToU. While I support the cause referenced in the ToU, I do not support the ToU itself. It violates the ideals of the Free Software movement and the GPL that the software is licensed under.
Oh wow, yeah, just yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that what I was specifically searching for had been moved from forums to the Discord black hole... which took a while to notice, since it would by definition not show up in search !
Circa 2010 most games had highly literate walkthroughs on sites like GameFAQs. By 2020 you could find only find walkthroughs in YouTube which occasionally answer a question hard to explain in words (like that level with a jump that doesn’t look like you can make it but you can) but means seeking through 20 hours of video to find the right 15 seconds.
Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say."
I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick.
People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try.
My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st.
My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively.
My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.
The problem with written-down lore is that for every one piece of information, there are six hundred pieces of copy-pasted information, false information, or malicious information; entire forums get SEO-cloned these days. Receiving it in real time from another human being is one of the very few ways you can guarantee it is real.
It's worth mentioning that Jason (the author) has dedicated his life to the preservation of information as the "containing" technologies are shifting like sand beneath our collective feet.
He's thought about this stuff for a very long time, in great depth, and is very much worth listening to.
Discord has no legal and accessible way of deleting all of your messages. You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service and risk getting banned to delete all of your messages. Do not use Discord seriously or in large quantities.
I often think that I would be a best practice for slack/discord to auto delete messages after 2 weeks, that would enforce the idea that they are really ephemeral
Also related: companies that think because they have a slack thread discussing a design they have documentation. Hard to find that thing 3 or 4 months later.
We will at one point know more about the Roman Empire than the World Wide Web 1994-1998, and it doesn't seem right. Huge chunks of cultural output that would be gold for future historians just... lost.
I have been trying to find and join some community of things that interest me. However I am not an expert on any of those things that interest me.
I have attempted several times to join into Discord, forums, subreddits, etc...
From all of those places and over the paper, Discord which is informal chatting should be the one I probably should feel more comfortable with. However, it is not the case. I always feel like an outsider.
This is completely irrelevant to the no back-up search problem here. But I struggle to understand in which case Discord would make for a good community place.
I just think it's the incredible to realize that with all this technology available to us, human brains are still where (most or at least much?) knowledge and lore are stored and retrieved from.
Does anyone remember xfire? I had such a popular username on there that I'd often get messages to sell the account for several $100 as a young kid, which I never did because I liked the name so much.
That was my favorite chat/IM app for gaming. That plus IRC + whatever in-game messaging/chat service, worked just fine. I dont know why they need "community" now ... or "archive" ability. Seems to overcomplicate things.
How feasible would it be for a team of hobby data archivists to scrape a whole server and put it on the public web? I'm guessing this is against Discord rules?
I moderate a server/community of high-end record makers discussing music production and a common question among us is how can we create a long-term database of all of the niche wisdom being divulged, for the benefit of the younger generations.
So far our best idea has been to publish an Obsidian Vault.
Lore will be dead anyway in a few years. AI bots will be flooding the net with shilling indistinguishable from human beings.
The only way to get valid information will be from someone you can be pretty sure is human. The audio video features of things like Discord help, as do verified identities.
I really do hate Discord and other types of chat-oriented help and forums. Mailing lists are still the gold standard, IMHO. It's super easy to keep updated, works with any computer, etc. And most importantly you're not using somebody else's server.
This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.
- play simple games on Jabber thru the client, like chess or checkers
- inline LaTeX with Kopete
- embedded YT videos with Kopete or some Pidgin plugins
- automatic message translating with Google Translate or
similar. It just worked. Again, it was a Pidgin plugin
- OTR/Omemo encrypted chats
- video/audio chats
- multi user chats
- file transfers
- chat from either text mode or from a graphical client
- chat with Gtalk peers
- scribble in a whiteboard
Please, gen-Z ers, stop comparing Discord with IRC, you just show ignorance. If any, compare Discord with Jabber and what we had from 2007 to ~2013-14 and beyond.
IRC and IM are totally different platforms with polar opossite usages. IRC chats were made to be public in order to join a public conversation, IM was made to chat between people you already knew, and sometimes in a group with few peers.
A MUC on a modern XMPP client/server can do most of it. There are XEPs for reactions, stickers, threading, etc. and it still works well for small voice and video chats. The voice chat for gaming though is better handled by Mumble.
While I agree that the locked-off history is a downside to me I think this is actually a benifit to the target audience.
A lot of people want to start communities and this lock in if knowledge and constant asking of the same questions keeps a view of activity and boosts users numbers. It also gives a more personal feel that may encourage people to stay.
Especially for streamers who are trying to make a personal-feeling connection I suspect this is incredibly valuable. Especially if you offload a lot of the repetitive work to unpaid moderators.
Basically the goal of Discord isn't to hold and organize information. The information is just a lure. The search feature exists so that you can convince yourself that the history is useful and available. This leads to people needing to come in and engage in a personal-feeling way.
Every so often, another cave is uncovered, knowledge of how to hunt or recordings of various activities etched or painted on the walls. Thousands of other caves are missing or lost forever.
Mostly when people think they want a Discord server (ie. not a server), what will
actually solve their problem is a Discourse server (an actual server).
They should go back to calling them "guilds", as they still do internally. While also a pre-existing word, its real definition is sufficiently different for there to be no confusion that this is a new & special concept unique to Discord.
I m often baffled why discord became popular. I guess because genz hate the web and prefer apps. The www is such a boomer perhaps. Discord even brings the UI of apps to the web. But it's not open, how can they live with that
I'm glad we agree that IRC isn't any better but even worse.
As much as I dislike Discord (bad search, terrible notification system) there's also no open platform that can really compete with Discord, they all crumble when it comes to voice chats.
I'll admit that a thing I like about private communities is that they feel more comfortable - that not every single user of the internet will be able to see it.
The whole archival thing (like on IRC) can be done with bots. You could forward a message, add an emoji or ping the bot to archive a message.
It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.
Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
> What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
IRC was always an alternative/replacement for forums for many people (there was always the IRC vs forums debate for projects, gaming teams, etc.). Discord is just better IRC (Slack would have been this without the self sabotage via limited free accounts and sleeping on voice chat for years). Now it's more... Discord vs Reddit. But think of all the lost lore on those IRC servers or random private forums that are now gone.
2 replies →
> Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
Server owners have the option for message logging bots. If communities wanted logging, they do have that option with server owner buy-in.
Arguably, difficult-to-archive by default if you aren't a server owner helps foster a safer chat experience.
37 replies →
> now being used as a replacement for forums
In Matrix there is an awful "threaded discussions" feature now, where collapsed forks branch off from the main chat flow. Which you have to separately manage. Keep a chat a chat, and a forum a forum.
3 replies →
Exactly right.
We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.
Ultimately, publicly searchable information is a voluntary act.
23 replies →
> file hosting
That part is such a joke. I routinely run into the problem that I can't send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES. In 2023. And Discord insists on storing the bit-perfect copies of original images and videos too to add to the insult. I would be perfectly fine with them being compressed and/or stored temporarily but nah. I have to resort to cloud storage services like Yandex disk to go around that asinine limitation.
Your files are too powerful, my ass.
8 replies →
Forums have the same problem of locking up knowledge, and they also keep out anyone who doesn’t want to constantly visit a web site.
Mailing lists and newsgroups are the proper mechanisms for this. And you should be able to use them with a browser forum-style too.
9 replies →
You’re seeing the symptom of something deeper.
Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.
So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.
LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.
Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.
There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.
In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.
This is correct. Google became a monopoly and they stopped caring about surfacing any results that they couldn't immediately monetize. If your content is archived in a forum somewhere, Google won't find it anyway, it'll instead show you results from youtube, ads, and whatever is on top of their cache. Search is effectively dead, so we have to resort to asking other humans directly for answers. Which sucks, but that's the phase of the competition/monopoly cycle that we're in right now.
9 replies →
Cynically speaking, platforms like Discord are not interested in their content being widely searchable. If a,user can satisfy their need for information by reading an existing answer (even within Discord), that user needs Discord less. The user depends less on there being an active community in Discord members of which could provide answers.
This all likely means fewer paying subscribers.
So, Discord search should be fine for a few months depth, and need not be good further into the past. Exposing historical data to external search engines is even less desirable.
Same of course applies to Slack, HipChat and whatever other commercial chat-like software.
I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable. If slack created some awesome feature that mined your company's chat logs to train something like the Librarian in Snow Crash that would be a massive selling point even if it means fewer chats between human beings. It's s valuable because it produces an answer without taxing another human.
9 replies →
And this is why interoperability is important, and this can likely only be forced via regulatory means.
The opposite of stackoverflow problem.
> it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else
I join a discord channel and honestly most of the time I’m overwhelmed. There’s often a ton of sub channels for every specific thing… that aren’t very active. It’s hard to get a feel for what is going on.
I join some only to find everyone is annoyed by my elementary question, but hell if I can find any answers in discord.
I just never know the lay of the land.
The handful of highly active people do, but that’s it.
Yup - the most engaged members are usually running the server, so they optimise it for their use. Multiple channels and categories make it easy to remember context if you switch often, and prevent recent relevant conversations from going out of scope too quickly.
Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things
I'm not sure Discord is necessarily good for "gaming communities". I mean, Discord is live chat. This is good for some aspects: match making, news, etc. - anything that has a short lifespan. However, a lot of things about games don't. Wikis are perfect for publishing this info. Think of a Street Fighter type game. Characters have their move set, that doesn't change. Imagine having to search through discord for how to do a fireball with Ryu. Then there's strategy - that changes, albeit periodically, after tournaments, etc. By all means, this stuff can be discussed in discord, but the consensus strategies have to be published because it's a terrible experience to search through chat logs and follow along with long finished conversations over who knows how many posts, figure out context, etc. compared to just reading it on a wiki.
Agreed.
I see Discord being used for things where forums (and non realtime conversations) used to rule supreme, like hobbies, tutorials, etc.
Why? A tutorial is not a real time chat. A showcase of hobby projects isn't a real time conversation either. And the searchability of these tools like Discord is terrible. I really don't understand why this terrible thing became popular.
Those communities iirc nowadays operate a dual mediawiki + discord server. Dustloop (arcsys, Guilty Gear & BlazBlue mostly) for example didn't vanish entirely to Discord, the discord is instead just used to organize edits to the wiki if I recall.
Discord is absolutely terrible at storing semi-structured information like a wikipage and I don't see them fix that without completely overhauling their entire service (although I'm sure they'll try and muck up the death of publicly available knowledge even more).
1 reply →
I guess I should be clearer - I'm more referring to multiplayer communities rather than actual game-specific resources. Communities, rather than knowledge resources, are where it's appropriate, basically. Of course, these often end up bleeding into eachother over time.
You would be surprised by the FGC entities that seemingly gravitate towards this very thing.
Most FGC servers solve this by having character channels with the best guides pinned.
What's far more unsettling is knowing that Discord's sysadmins, as well as their acquirer (which for a minute looked like it might have been MSFT) have the complete plaintext logs of every DM conversation. Every private link, every NDA'd product info, every insider crypto tip, all the passwords and credentials, all the sexting, all the nudes.... and all linked to your real world identity via the non-VoIP phone number you have to add to your account to join most channel groups ("servers").
The trove of blackmail and extortion data alone is worth a few dozen millions. The insider crypto trading that Discord makes possible is worth probably $20-50mm USD each month.
And the mundane reality is that they won't use it for blackmail or in any such personalized fashion (except for government requests). What they will use it for, is training language models. That's the new way of monetizing "user-generated content", especially one you've managed to lock up so it can't be casually scrapped by anyone else.
Don't forget that if you do decide to delete your account its simply renamed not purged.
One of Discord's shareholders is Tencent (not Microsoft!!), however, the co-founders are still on the board and are highly occupied with day to day stuff. Message deletion on Discord is traceless from the outset (once deleted, no one, not even database admins, can retrieve deleted messages; the same thing also applies to the metadata, but not messages, of deleted users), in fact, this is one of the features they are bragging with. Traceless deletion is verified by both engineering related blogposts and interactions with support.
Unfortunately, even the LLVM community has chosen a combination of Discord/Discourse, and deprecated their mailing list/IRC channel. This is a very unhealthy trend, and only the most ardent of communities such as Linux/Git/GCC stick to old-fashioned publicly-archived mailing lists.
[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README
Well, that's because mailing lists are terrible.
2 replies →
Most of German immigration information and advice is locked into private Facebook groups. This information is not good nor reliable, but it's the only way to tell how things actually play out at the immigration office, for example.
That information would serve a lot more people if it was available to them with a simple search.
indeed very disappointing that most games have wikis/subreddits where one can get the gist of it served in a consumer friendly format but public services do not
3 replies →
Reddit is still bad, not only because it's a platform, but also because it tends to lock threads after merely a couple of months (which prevents necroposting, which sometimes IS the right thing to do, while creating a new post is the wrong one) - so even if someone comes in later with a solution, they can't even answer the previous posters !
(and some of the new forums, seems like Discourse has it on by default?)
Hackernews seems to solve this by simply not notifying us of responses, so an ancient post that somehow gets responded to is just never noticed.
2 replies →
Discord is nice because it lets you have small talk and build strong communities with a more natural cadence. In the same way we don't record every spoken conversation, I think we don't need to stress about discord going missing. I imagine any historically relevant outcomes of conversations on discord will be recorded outside of discord.
All that said, it's still important to have knowledge bases to reference I agree, but I think that should be an effort separate to Discord. I wouldn't want to search an arbitrarily long chat log to find answers to questions, it's not well suited for the task.
I would say in something like speedrunning there is tons of information that only exists in discord pinned threads etc., and in the combined heads of community members.
To those who care about that hobby a lot of very useful information would vanish if discord went away. That's not a great state of affairs and discord is a very bad place to keep that information, even at the best of times it's not easy to find things in there. But I think it's probably the case for a decent number of communities.
You could definitely argue that it's not historically relevant, since, if speedrunning as a whole disappeared it wouldn't really matter.
I will say what I feel like I say whenever this comes up: Discord could contribute to a solution here, even partially, by making Discord Forums search indexable. It would (theoretically) help with the "has my question been answered before" and it would (theoretically) make (some) archival efforts simpler.
I discovered one years ago that Facebook had a trove of useful technical groups that are completely invisible because they are not indexable. I wonder how much knowledge we have lost because of discord and FB are the new forum
Slack, IRC, Matrix are all like this too. All the services really need a "Make public searchable archive" option.
Yes, I know this is opt-in, but Matrix has a static & crawlable service for their chats: https://view.matrix.org/
2 replies →
I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.
We've had the same thing happen with a local gaming club - we've pretty much wholesale moved from Facebook to Discord. Which is great for current members, but makes recruiting (which is sort of important in a college town) next to impossible.
> It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers
Not just on Discord, in general, everywhere: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and even here HackerNews.
It's not just about being searchable or long-lived, but that they can pull the rug anytime (or make stealth edits like the Reddit fiasco with their admin Spez)
How to solve this? Should the burden of searchability and archival be a requirement upon companies that provide social media services? Third-party bots already manually crawl all services and provide external search/archive interfaces (like the "Reddit Undelete" services) How to make that better?
> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful
Their search makes me want to pull my hair out.
Why can't I just search the history with grep? That's a feature I would pay for (if anyone at Discord is reading this and wants my $10/month)
I'd be happy even if they just didn't hijack Command/Ctrl-F. You can't even search for text on the screen you're viewing without being dumped into their shitful pseudosearch.
2 replies →
Because it would be obscenely expensive (in terms of computational resources) to search history via grep. Hence why we use an inverted index.
4 replies →
And you can't even filter out spammy channels like bot command channels. On mobile it's particularly awful where if you look for a message's context, it's very likely you'll lose your "place" in the search panel and have to scroll from the top all over.
You can filter a discord search by what channel the message is in.
1 reply →
IRC was the same way for 15 or so years, all mostly lost.
IRC used to be indexed by Google and such though. Also because irc clients didn't have rich media support a lot of knowledge would make it outside of IRC like code snippets or microblogs that would eventually get indexed.
2 replies →
I'd say it's a symptom of how toxic the public internet (especially Twitter) has become. When there is an angry mob constantly scouring every community for transgressions (real or imagined), being unindexed and unsearchable is a feature not a bug.
That is if you get support at all. Many times I have not. At least on an issue tracker I can find other people who might have solved a similar problem on their own.
> more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before
It becomes painfully obvious and a little funny when the question triggers a bot to reply with a link to a pinned comment answering FAQ#36, and you see it happen a dozen times a day.
I wonder if setting up a discourse instance is too much of a friction that businesses are instead choosing a real-time chat inspite of it being awful for knowledge sharing as a whole.
May be there's a need-gap for a low friction forum.
Even more unsettling, when you realise there must be a lot of children talking to a lot of adults, about who knows what, on discords invisible to parents and police.
Do people want to write comments and replies that are publicly searchable?
Discord's search works great for me
The search is per-server so before you even start you need to know which server has the thing you're looking for, which isn't always obvious, and you can't search a server without actively joining it, announcing your presence and using up your finite server slots. There's no equivalent to Googling something and passively pulling answers from wherever.
Unless i'm missing something (and noting the drawbacks mentioned elsewhere re. no google search), its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness. You can't think of some set of terms and have it bring up a particular thing, you have to know an exact word used in it.
This means you need to know enough already just to get it to come up, and more to prune out the other 500 results if your term is generic enough. Basically, the search only really works if you want to find a specific conversation you remember (and it better be recent, given how easily you forget the specifics of things as time passes)
1 reply →
Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.
The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.
Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.
But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).
> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful
I don't think it's bad at all, why do you say it's awful? I feel like you think it's bad because you have a negative bias towards discord
It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks.
I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.
I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever.
Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.
>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server
Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
> Except you could've, and still can.
For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s).
> People need to learn how to adapt.
They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.
22 replies →
Discord is huge with the kids today. I saw my nephew kept checking his phone and like a typical old fart I challenged him and asked what the hell he's checking. Turns out it's discord. He subscribes to channels on discord, some are read-only, just a way of distributing notifications.
The draw is the single sign on. You sign on to one simple service and you have all your friends, all the games you follow, all the groups.
Why does Discord even care if you're discussing/distributing cheats, so long as you obey the law? Who exactly is the Trust & Safety team supposed to serve?
Discord has been banning groups for discussing breaking the rules in games completely unrelated to discord.
Many cheats violate copyright licenses and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/bungie-wins-lawsuit-against-che...
DMCA takedown notices take up employee time, so maybe they formed this team to preemptively shut down anything that looks like it might cause DMCA notices to come in.
You lost me at GitHub : sure, the public part of it is being crawled, but it's still a platform (and a Microsoft-owned one to boot !), so if you care about the Web or libre software, you should stay the hell out of it, regardless of the sub-feature you use.
This is the same Discord Trust and Safety team that was defending and participating in communities sharing cub content.
Wonderful.
What in the nine hells is "cub content"? Are we talking about drawn pictures of animals or actual bestiality? One of these is illegal, and the other is... what like Fievel Mousekewitz goes wild?
2 replies →
You mean there's no way to have a bot that logs conversations in discord?
There is. And they are actually quite easy to make. I would suggest this approach to anyone worried about losing information.
I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?
For a better explanation from someone more eloquent than myself: https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed?
The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
I think it is purely a technology problem. Discord software is good and for text/voice chat nothing really compares to the ease of use, features and ecosystem around it.
7 replies →
Note how it took a decade for most people to realize that Twitter is harmful after the 2013 APIpocalypse (when Mastodon got started).
And in the mean time we even had Trump showing every day just how bad it is !
Totally this. When a project decides to go down this route I start questioning their whole decision making and feel alienated as you say.
I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.
"If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy"
so basically no one? cause almost nobody actually cares about digital privacy
I do. Hence why my discord persona is essentially made up and used as a marketing tool for my artsy hobbies, same way as my instagram profile is carefully curated to be something I'm not.
When you see the number of people that are still using Github after Microsoft bought them : I guess not ?
Yes, but also no. Each time Microsoft slips, you do see the waves of folks migrating and a lot of big projects—like KDE, GNOME, Freedesktop—have moved elsewhere since ’16. My concern is more on the education side where schools are starting kids on the proprietary service and YouTube ‘gurus’ saying you need it which might make its growth outpace folks leaving after all these the outages, or some new EEE initiative, etc. that have historically caused migrations. The other concern is communities that have used Microsoft GitHub IDs for identity in the community (i.e. Elm requires all public packages are published to Microsoft GitHub and your user ID is the an identifier, Nixpkgs requires the ID for its maintainers.nix, Unison Share accounts requires sign-ins via Microsoft GitHub, etc.).
While I totally disagree with the forced proprietary collaboration (need an account & can’t contribute without, nor can you self-host or fork to fix the platform) of Microsoft GitHub, at least unlike the Discord situation it is search indexable, reading doesn’t require an account or JavaScript, and is strictly public communication (no DMs floating around). Once you start buying into the larger platform though, the corner for yourself has been painted in—but that’s not to say you couldn’t have mirror that accepts merge requests without an account or still have a mailing list/inbox to mail patches to. (But, like, just set up your project elsewhere in the first place and stop playing into a social media platform masquerading as a code forge—as well as let folks sign up with email or WebFinger)
2 replies →
Alienate privacy? How?
You are requiring users sign up for an account on a proprietary, closed-source, for-profit server. All metadata will flow through this entity and whoever they choose to share or sell this data to. Many rooms demand SMS verification which will often leak who you are and prevent anonymity. Chat platforms also include DMs and smaller group chats for private conversations around projects and there is no E2E so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord. Users must also agree to the ToS set by Discord—not your community—which can change and go against the community wishes. They also have the maximum authority to just axe your community by shutting down its chatroom (it’s not a “server”) if a bad apple breaks those ToS.
2 replies →
This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information.
You can check it out the repo here: https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev
Linen.dev/s/cypress slack-chats.kotlinlang.org
You can also google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev to see the conversations that has been indexed
I wish the `@mention` `!mention` distinction become more widely used. I'm looking forward to checking out Linen once I find a group using it.
+1
I often like to tag people so that it is unambiguous which "Alex" I am referring to and avoids me misspelling the names. But often I don't need to bother people. It would be nice if I could link to the user without notifying them.
Quick note: On your website, there's this metric:
> Our largest community has seen over 180,0000 Google impressions
Is that 180,000 or 1,800,000?
Apart from that, it looks really good! As I understand it, you actually cache all those conversations, right? So basically, it's like mailing-list archives, but for discord and slack; even if the servers go down or get closed or threads are deleted or move somewhere else, the content on your site stays up?
180 lakh?
How do I compare this to mattermost?
THIS. YES.
I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did.
It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me.
I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.
I don't use my real phone number for foreign data selling companies so I use SMS verification services.
Your situation explains why my accounts always get suddenly banned after a while without information. You can't get around the number thing usually, but having a number that works is not enough appearantly
Which services do you use?
What services are you using? Most I have looked into do not work for the vast majority of applications that are popular
1 reply →
Discord's policies are frankly absurd. I'm pretty sure that at one point, if not now, they suggest using a friend's phone to verify your account if you're prompted to provide a phone number. Discord is too big now to excuse such careless behavior.
I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects.
I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers.
Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there
[0]: https://disc.wiki
This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking!
> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.
Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!
> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.
Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!
> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.
Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.
There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.
[0]: https://disc.wiki/docs
It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge".
For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.
2 replies →
Ooh, I've never heard of this before, thanks a lot for the heads-up. It's still messy but it's a great base.
Wish it were open source though.
This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours.
This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.
> In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions
It's doubly hard when you had a private chat with someone who got laid off. For some reason Slack makes such accounts/chat history really hard to browse once some time has passed. And sometimes you have valuable information in your chat history with that person!
Further down this rabbit hole: "The Web of Alexandria" by Bret Victor, http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria. ----
> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk. > > The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution. > > Two thoughts: > > It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. > > It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. > >It's not working so well today either. > > We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media.
If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.
Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.
That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA datacenter has only a fraction of the claimed capacity and they used the secrecy to embezzle funds on top of the overpaid contracts to Quislings. Because that is what authoritarians do to buy loyalty.
After all their nominal function is to prevent terrorism by sorting through needle stacks many months after the fact. Failure just means more chances to attack encryption again!
Hah. I am torn between what I hope to be more true.
This is the problem of the shitweb. Shitweb being a concern from law enforcement agencies regarding the difficulties to capture and analyze internet activities that are buried in pictures with text, video, hyperlocal cultural language (think l33tspeak) and temporal communications. The size of the datacentre likely won't help much.
(Tried to find a link to the definition of shitweb, wow not a great search)
When it comes to discord the linkages to China side seem stronger via Tencent
I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of.
Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.
While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.
Its good to remember that oral traditions have been (and still are) huge part of humanity; in many ways discord can be seen as internet iteration of that age old part of culture.
If we are going to supplant oral traditions with a massive disconnected worldwide web (sometimes of lies), and replace learned knowledge with 'googling' as a skill- whats the harm in trying to 1. make technologies that will protect the information, or 2. generate a culture of preservation to protect such information.
1 reply →
Geocities deserves the scorn and criticism. It died and took with it untold amounts of websites before archivists had a chance to save them.
It's funny to me; what halcyon days are people longing for? When was the Internet an organized, easy place to navigate?
There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.
2 replies →
2000-2010 or so.
I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.
https://discourse.org/ is the closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re asking.
I'm actually looking for something like this. Discourse pricing seems to be around $100 per month minimum for a group of 500? It's a huge leap from the forums where minimum cost is about $8/month.
4 replies →
I swear every time I find answer on discourse it's near-always useless...
Discourse is the modern phpBB. It's really good, and both are about 10,000x better than private chat servers.
Discourse is not really good, it's got endless scrolling at takes forever to navigate what could be done in seconds with pagination.
Pages are a defining feature of old forums, without them it's just another Reddit-alike or something.
1 reply →
I don't like it. It works poorly without JavaScript, but this isn't quite the main problem. The main problem is that it seems to have the same sterile look everywhere just like every single "modern" corporate site, the same as new design reddit, facebook, or goolag, or anything else.
That’s because forums are themselves an abomination, just create a newsgroup in the `alt.*` hierarchy or set up a mailing list and be done. Just because you insist on using a web browser to access it doesn’t mean everyone should have to. You can use a web-based client and others can use native clients and nobody is locked out.
Newsgroups have obnoxious hierarchal branching replies, unlike any normal human conversation, unlike what forums do, and they lack lots of minor forum features.
7 replies →
Forums are not great for usability though.
You need a unique login for every forum, notifications are a mess and usually via email, the UIs are poor and difficult to use, every forum usually has a different theme with different locations for buttons and settings, there's no real time way to communicate so everything takes forever, and everyone has stupid profile footers in their posts that make you scroll twice as much as you should have to.
There are also bugs like quoting a post that has images reposts all of the images again and creates even more pointless scrolling. Or forums that lack even basic image resizing so someone uploads their 24MP photos and it goes way off the side of the screen and makes the post take ages to load.
I'm sure it could all be fixed somehow, but current stuff is just awful and I absolutely dislike interacting with forums.
I've found many useful threads and answers for some super niche and obfuscated stuff on Gitter where you get some discord like benefits (better irc) and is indexed by engines. I liked their model where you can have rooms for topics, repos etc but shame it's hardly used.
Take a look at Groups.io: You can set up a group with both a mailing list and a forum for free, for up to a certain size, and then it’s some minimum price and $0.04/month per user for all the feature.
What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake?
Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.
Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way.
As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.
This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
A middle ground would be to offer public searchable logs, but strip the usernames. I would be fine with that.
I mean you self answered here. Any person in that discord could be transcribing all the data to a public site, so nothing really changes.
Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.
Do you think this is true in the world of Chat GPT? Couldn't the IRC/Discord content be indexed and then queried from an AI service?
I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only.
It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users.
That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform.
My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups.
It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.
The app launch anxiety rings true for me. Discord is sensory overload for me.
You can mute notifications for the entire server, change them to mentions only, or any picked channels quite easily by right clicking it
"the entire server" of which there are hundreds
I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned.
https://pidgin.im/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/
Worse are open source communities only using Slack.
As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money.
Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.
The free version is unfortunately hobbled but slack is a lot better than discord at least at critical things like "getting caught up on messages that were sent since you last read." Some friends and I recently started a discord server for an async D&D game and it's a real pain to get caught up. They have the same red "you were here" line and the same "X new messages" banner as slack, but discord's default scrolling behavior works against you.
I don't know if it's as true these days but in the early days you couldn't get Discord installed on office computers because of the association that it was a "gaming app".
I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.
The age old question between convenience and safety.
Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.
Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it.
Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit.
Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.
Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this.
90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.
I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.
> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.
Not necessarily
I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
I agree. I think this is kind of a feature as you can be a bit more relaxed in chat, knowing that it will probably get buried over time.
Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults.
Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.
> Discord is a horrible echo chamber
Mastodon is the same yet most people want that, smaller communities where they tagalong with others.
Agreed. Frankly, the chamber is itself a problem. The community is just a nicer name for a tribe you currently subscribe to. It is downright folksy. I don't automatically mind, but there is no reason to pretend otherwise.
What toxic communities did you follow to wind up with that take?
Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.
More like Death of Internet as we used to know it.
Imagine a tranquil and secluded nature reserve [internet] that attracts like-minded people [nerds/geeks/tech enthusiasts] seeking peace and tranquillity. But with the addition of an airport, a nearby suburban development and a sprawling ski resort, the once idyllic space has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub, unrecognisable from its former state. Although you still venture into the park, it feels like a different place altogether, leaving you with a sense of isolation and disconnection.
I'm afraid that the next thing we'll see is AI that creates content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content completely taking over online discourse and social media, together with entire fake personas. Why? Sales & Marketing.
This is happening elsewhere too - all kinds of traditional forums for hardware, be it cars laptops or watches have now almost entirely moved to Facebook groups, only the biggest communities still hang around and even then just barely, with a shadow of their former selves. And Facebook is even worse than discord, with absolutely abysmal search and very few tools to engage with your community effectively. But it's easy to join so a lot of people prefer it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.text...
I am on so Discords, but whenever I come across an Open Source project that uses it as sole form of support/discussion, I move on and look for an alternative.
It is just not useful at all for any kind of documentation/reference, but also for support: if it’s a reasonably popular project and you’re not on the same time zone, you will never be able to see any replies at all.
Sometimes I can't ask a question to a open source project because they decided to move everything to discord and lock it behind a account verification that needs a phone number I am not willing to put there (or rather don't have)
I literally use less promising products sometimes just because they not yet moved everything to discord
My company, a FAANG, went from having all our documentation in a wiki that is searchable by anyone, to heavily using Quip (some sort of Google Docs).
Engineers resisted for a while because it's obviously awful for documentation. You can't even search it AT ALL. But since all the non-technical staff had an easier life editing Quip than editing the Wiki it's now the defacto solution for all.
This is going to be doom of engineering at this company. Over the years I have found countless things on random wikis from random teams that helped me achieve my own solution. Quip destroyed that.
Discord is the same.
I blame slack for gaslighting everyone into believing chat makes a good knowledgebase.
I actually wrote about this phenomenon in my Tell HN post a few weeks ago:
Tell HN: Discord is obviating my need to use StackOverflow
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262
Reading your Tell made me realize something – I just don’t really google things anymore or look for answers online. Either read the official docs or ask the resident expert in my company for help.
SO feels increasingly less fitting as my problems become more niche and discord et al are flooded with newbies who can’t help me. Or it would take so long to even explain my problem that there’s no way a chat has the attention span required.
Depends on the Discord. Some have some pretty advanced members in there, usually the creators of whatever library or framework I need to use.
2 replies →
It's basically true. I get the best support from some official Discords... A lot of it is from just searching and some is from just posting a question. It would be a pity if it were to just go away and never be recorded for all the smart answers would be lost.
Discord really doesn't have an export feature? Seems like something we should all immediately demand. Especially for paying customers.
Also see https://github.com/freenet/locutus
Unofficial / unauthorized with unique ToU: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
That certainly is a unique ToU. While I support the cause referenced in the ToU, I do not support the ToU itself. It violates the ideals of the Free Software movement and the GPL that the software is licensed under.
Oh wow, yeah, just yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that what I was specifically searching for had been moved from forums to the Discord black hole... which took a while to notice, since it would by definition not show up in search !
This is just one bit of the death of text.
Circa 2010 most games had highly literate walkthroughs on sites like GameFAQs. By 2020 you could find only find walkthroughs in YouTube which occasionally answer a question hard to explain in words (like that level with a jump that doesn’t look like you can make it but you can) but means seeking through 20 hours of video to find the right 15 seconds.
I remember going to a copy shop in 1999 to print out a GameFAQs walkthrough for Fallout 2.
Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say."
I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick.
People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try.
[0] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685
My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st.
My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively.
My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.
Err, ArchiveTeam uses IRC as primary communication method.
The site will return to responsiveness when the Hackernews storm is passed. I assure everyone the writing will still be relevant in a day.
The problem with written-down lore is that for every one piece of information, there are six hundred pieces of copy-pasted information, false information, or malicious information; entire forums get SEO-cloned these days. Receiving it in real time from another human being is one of the very few ways you can guarantee it is real.
well.. if you can tell its a human being..
It's worth mentioning that Jason (the author) has dedicated his life to the preservation of information as the "containing" technologies are shifting like sand beneath our collective feet.
He's thought about this stuff for a very long time, in great depth, and is very much worth listening to.
Finger guns
I’ve been working on a fix for this at https://www.answeroverflow.com/ !
It’s an open source project https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow designed to index the content of your Discord community into Google
Some example pages you can check out:
An indexed question: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986
The C# community page: https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352
pretty neat solution!
How timely, given I was looking into how to archive the content of a server I "run".
Discord has no legal and accessible way of deleting all of your messages. You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service and risk getting banned to delete all of your messages. Do not use Discord seriously or in large quantities.
>Inb4 new service that automates getting you banned
> You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service
Or make a GDPR request and ask your local data protection authority to order Discord to delete them for you. https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights
Centralization does not scale. Discord's death is inevitable, and it will be far worse than ImageShack.
You're not wrong, but Imgur hasn't even hit that level yet.
I often think that I would be a best practice for slack/discord to auto delete messages after 2 weeks, that would enforce the idea that they are really ephemeral
Also related: companies that think because they have a slack thread discussing a design they have documentation. Hard to find that thing 3 or 4 months later.
Even harder when you've turned on Slack auto-delete for "security reasons."
Really Slack is more approaching IRC when configured like that, except I could still scroll back my IRC client. In Slack they're just _gone_.
Or your company hasn't paid for the 'good' version and the all the old conversations past a certain date are consumed by the Langoliers.
Well, and that's not to mention the massive amounts of personal data and metadata Discord is hoarding and doing whatever it wants with.
I fail to see why this article didn't mention that OpenFeint had a privacy lawsuit in its end as well.
One can only hope this privacy-hostile proprietary platform dies sooner rather than later.
If I think an open source library question might have value to someone else I'll always open an issue on GitHub, even if they try to push to discord.
Maybe if discord communities added AI chat agents trained on their docs and discord discussions you'd have less of an information black hole.
We will at one point know more about the Roman Empire than the World Wide Web 1994-1998, and it doesn't seem right. Huge chunks of cultural output that would be gold for future historians just... lost.
I have been trying to find and join some community of things that interest me. However I am not an expert on any of those things that interest me.
I have attempted several times to join into Discord, forums, subreddits, etc...
From all of those places and over the paper, Discord which is informal chatting should be the one I probably should feel more comfortable with. However, it is not the case. I always feel like an outsider.
This is completely irrelevant to the no back-up search problem here. But I struggle to understand in which case Discord would make for a good community place.
I just think it's the incredible to realize that with all this technology available to us, human brains are still where (most or at least much?) knowledge and lore are stored and retrieved from.
What a well written description of a looming large problem. A great read.
Does anyone remember xfire? I had such a popular username on there that I'd often get messages to sell the account for several $100 as a young kid, which I never did because I liked the name so much.
That was my favorite chat/IM app for gaming. That plus IRC + whatever in-game messaging/chat service, worked just fine. I dont know why they need "community" now ... or "archive" ability. Seems to overcomplicate things.
How feasible would it be for a team of hobby data archivists to scrape a whole server and put it on the public web? I'm guessing this is against Discord rules?
Someone should form a team of archivists. An Archive Force
https://www.answeroverflow.com/
Cool bot looking to help with this problem.
I was thinking of something like this. Maybe have a bot that automatically archives and uploads everything to some site? To archive.org maybe?
Is this guy writing articles about his own tweets?
Yeah! What the hell is wrong with him! Nobody wants to read that!
I moderate a server/community of high-end record makers discussing music production and a common question among us is how can we create a long-term database of all of the niche wisdom being divulged, for the benefit of the younger generations.
So far our best idea has been to publish an Obsidian Vault.
And then there are companies that hire security people fresh out of school and then Discord ends up being blocked.
for whoever unable to access the article directly:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.text...
Lore will be dead anyway in a few years. AI bots will be flooding the net with shilling indistinguishable from human beings.
The only way to get valid information will be from someone you can be pretty sure is human. The audio video features of things like Discord help, as do verified identities.
I really do hate Discord and other types of chat-oriented help and forums. Mailing lists are still the gold standard, IMHO. It's super easy to keep updated, works with any computer, etc. And most importantly you're not using somebody else's server.
Most things Discord can do (except audio / video), you could do in IRC 30 years ago; Discord just has a nice / usable webclient.
Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create a nice webclient for IRC (which you could self-host with little effort and get to own your data).
This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.
With jabber I could
- play simple games on Jabber thru the client, like chess or checkers
- inline LaTeX with Kopete
- embedded YT videos with Kopete or some Pidgin plugins
- automatic message translating with Google Translate or similar. It just worked. Again, it was a Pidgin plugin
- OTR/Omemo encrypted chats
- video/audio chats
- multi user chats
- file transfers
- chat from either text mode or from a graphical client
- chat with Gtalk peers
- scribble in a whiteboard
Please, gen-Z ers, stop comparing Discord with IRC, you just show ignorance. If any, compare Discord with Jabber and what we had from 2007 to ~2013-14 and beyond.
IRC and IM are totally different platforms with polar opossite usages. IRC chats were made to be public in order to join a public conversation, IM was made to chat between people you already knew, and sometimes in a group with few peers.
2 replies →
A MUC on a modern XMPP client/server can do most of it. There are XEPs for reactions, stickers, threading, etc. and it still works well for small voice and video chats. The voice chat for gaming though is better handled by Mumble.
Can you please list some features Discord has that IRC lacks?
(Since IRC is a protocol, let's use the mIRC application for comparison with Discord.)
4 replies →
sounds like you have a business
at a company i worked at we had a bot system that would convert significant chat messages into full posts with indexing
create a discord plugin that makes preserving , highlighting , indexing and contextualizing important messages east
While I agree that the locked-off history is a downside to me I think this is actually a benifit to the target audience.
A lot of people want to start communities and this lock in if knowledge and constant asking of the same questions keeps a view of activity and boosts users numbers. It also gives a more personal feel that may encourage people to stay.
Especially for streamers who are trying to make a personal-feeling connection I suspect this is incredibly valuable. Especially if you offload a lot of the repetitive work to unpaid moderators.
Basically the goal of Discord isn't to hold and organize information. The information is just a lure. The search feature exists so that you can convince yourself that the history is useful and available. This leads to people needing to come in and engage in a personal-feeling way.
T'was always thus.
Every so often, another cave is uncovered, knowledge of how to hunt or recordings of various activities etched or painted on the walls. Thousands of other caves are missing or lost forever.
A nifty tool to archive chats: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
well, there are multiple solutions for that https://top.gg/tag/backup
Mostly when people think they want a Discord server (ie. not a server), what will actually solve their problem is a Discourse server (an actual server).
They should go back to calling them "guilds", as they still do internally. While also a pre-existing word, its real definition is sufficiently different for there to be no confusion that this is a new & special concept unique to Discord.
I love that Discord is ephemeral. The right to be forgotten doesn't exist on the searchable web no matter how much the EU wishes it were so.
No, it is persistent with denial by deletion.
The cancer called Discord has become so disgustinly common that they ought to be designated as a Common Carrier.
I hate discord. Bring back MSN and Yahoo Messengers
I m often baffled why discord became popular. I guess because genz hate the web and prefer apps. The www is such a boomer perhaps. Discord even brings the UI of apps to the web. But it's not open, how can they live with that
[dead]
I'm glad we agree that IRC isn't any better but even worse.
As much as I dislike Discord (bad search, terrible notification system) there's also no open platform that can really compete with Discord, they all crumble when it comes to voice chats.
I'll admit that a thing I like about private communities is that they feel more comfortable - that not every single user of the internet will be able to see it.
The whole archival thing (like on IRC) can be done with bots. You could forward a message, add an emoji or ping the bot to archive a message.
Indeed, not every conversation has to be on the internet, accessible to everyone.
I thought hackers would care about privacy after all.
Discord is still an unparallelled product if you use it correctly.
If you want open and long conversations then use forum (real forum, not hn)