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Comment by chrisrogers | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.

I've seen some IRC channels archive their chat as search-able HTML pages that are also indexed by search engines. Wish Discord servers would do something similar.

being in the irc room and logging it is enough and only requires access to the room.

Discord knows better, this is by design. Their investors would run screaming if they knew what was in those chat logs. The lack of searchability is their biggest defense against being hauled in front of Congress because the public just isn't aware of how much of the platform is extremism.

That's too bad, because a lot of open-source projects have moved to Discord, and it's an absolute pain that every time I want to search, I have to 1. login and 2. join yet another Discord server.

I find it easy to mute and put the ones I don't frequent often in a folder and only go there when I need to. I only actively visit and contribute to 2 Discord servers but that number might grow if the reddit communities stay dark (and I don't blame them for doing so).

I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use. It hurts my brain that CNCF and Kubernetes use this as a platform. At least in Discord I can search thru years of content and discover a discussion instead of asking the same questions over and over.

> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week.

Gitter had terrible search, but one advantage Gitter had over Slack and Discord is that it required no login to lurk, and chatrooms were indexable by search engines. You can still do so with Gitter's switch to Element, although Element leaves a lot to be desired on the UX front.

> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use.

But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.

>But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.

If it's inevitable, the service doesn't matter. YCombinator can one day do to HN what Reddit did to itself, but I'll still enjoy the community while it lasts.

It's better to work more on a "good enough for now but keep backups in mind" state rather than "there is nothing perfect so I won't go anywhere" state. If your mindset is the latter, why value online communitie at all to begin with?

What I mean is that it's inevitable for a closed-source, proprietary solution like Discord. The service does matter, and there are better alternatives to Discord for online OSS communities.

Sure, just like how there were better alternatives for Facebook, and Twitter. Even when they were at their peaks. I think we've seen often enough in history that the best, most technically impressive tool is rarely the most popular one.

If you have the power to move the people you can help try to fight that aspect of society. But at large we can't even lead the horses to those theoretical oases (let alone make them drink)

I think you're missing the context of the thread. An open-source project doesn't need to choose a tool that competes with Discord in popularity -- popularity is not important here. The aim is not to attract millions of users, the aim is to provide a valuable and sustainable resource to its community that it can link in the project's README file. A tool like Discourse or Zulip is more sustainable than Discord because they are open source, history is exportable, and the software is trivially self-hostable in case the managed hosting solutions don't pan out.

This might sound rude but as a matter of fact, being FOSS developer I don't consider FOSS projects using Discord/Slack etc. to be worthy of my time.

I despise locking down knowledge to a walled garden.

And not just extremism, but problematic. A cursory search of Disboard will find all sorts of sexual/BDSM communities that are openly aimed at minors.

It's different in that IRC is designed & understood to be short lived real time chat. Who cares if I can't find that type of content via Google? Discord is being used as a permanent info repository, like a replacement for discussion boards, wikis, etc. This is the type of info I want to search for.

It's all the worst aspects of IRC in shiny web package.

IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.

In theory. In practice, like Slack, Discord is unsearchable. As someone rightly said on another thread: Discord is where knowledge goes to die.

Until you train llm on it. Which WILL happen.

LLMs perform lossy compression on knowledge, so they're not a good replacement for indexing and search. If anything, you want to have the latter, and expose it to LLM as a tool it can use, regardless of whether the LLM was trained/fine-tuned on that same content or not.

more like a knowledge blackhole.

but IRC was never controlled by a unique corporation/business. Was community driven

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