The same happened with forums. They're all subreddits, Facebook groups or Discord chats now. A lot of valuable information is kept hidden in those groups now, and it makes me really sad.
I upgraded to VPS for $500. The other admin spent 15-20 hours fixing/troubleshooting/transferring. And you know what? At the end of all this, I paid to give my data to these jerks, to keep it online for them to harvest. The forums are dead quiet.
Now I think, Discord is fine. They'll just sell the data to AI companies directly, the burden won't fall on me.
Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers.
Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this.
Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.
The big thing about discord is you can chat now with people but the knowledge is not in a good format to come back to later.
However, if you managed to find the forum on a search engine and took the trouble to sign up for an account, you are more likely to abide by the general vibe of the place, rather than Redditize it with shallow, meme-y comments that reliably get a lot of upvotes.
The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic.
I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.
I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X".
The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success.
I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture:
Not only a lot of communities are hidden because of Discord (at least with Reddit they were more discoverable), the worst part is the fact that they are unsearchable or behind a paywall.
Like the "join my discord if you pay at least 3$/mo!" is pretty innocent but you are gatekeeping a community that before was pubblic.
If we are talking about something like a content creator focused about an hobby or pc problems you can see how Google will become even more useless.
Reddit was the least bad choice between it and Discord but has failed the "i want to be a social network".