Comment by ehnto
3 years ago
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.