But in general IRC is not really archived etc? So just as throw-away as Discord imo.
Pre-LLM-GenAI gathering information from huge chat logs was quite limited.
But different extraction mechanisms always existed. Some people kept logs, some servers/channels had web-archives.
Discord tries to keep it exclusive to them.
(Focussing on technical side here, whether it's socially wanted is a different big question, which ends with a "it depends")
grep/recoll. Fast even on ancient machines.You can also log from the server; using a multitude of modules; https://docs.inspircd.org/4/modules/log_syslog/ or https://docs.inspircd.org/4/modules/log_json/ if you're using inspircd.
Turns out what matters isn’t how easy it is to access logs but whether anyone cares to do it.
Heres an archive searcher for #bitfighter on freenode: https://bitfighter.org/irclogs/search.php
A channel with one day logged in 2024, then nothing for two years, then nine days logged in 2022, five days logged in 2021, etc?
What about big tech channels like, say, nodejs and javascript?
The point that I am making is that the capability and software exists, even for others to view, if you want. I mean: did you need an account or specialised client for these logs?
Thats the point.
Be the change you want to see if you want archives uploaded. Or, do what others do: grep your local files or znc logs.
And for IRC, I think this is a good compromise between "everything is public at all times" and "everything is walled off and private at all times".
If you want to have a log of your use, it's possible. If the org running the server wants a log, they can do that too. Is that possible with something like Discord?
With discord the message might get pinned if a mod thinks it was useful and remains undiscoverable for the majority of people
IME it doesn't work very well. If you hang around a discord server long enough you see the same conversations happening over and over and over. And the app is not good at helping you finding old conversations (which is why they are repeated endlessly).
It's also very bad at resuming where you left off, so it's incredibly difficult to follow an active thread without missing anything:
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/18d4tiv/inexpli...