To see it in action, feel free to open this in an incognito window, it won't prompt you for credentials https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/
The current solution is that projects that want their publicly available content to be search engine indexed set up https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive, which usually involves hooking a GitHub action up to GitHub Pages for a 0-infrastructure deployment. Ultimately, that's the same model as an IRC indexing project like this one: a separate tool from the chat server is responsible for search engine indexing.
Lean runs one here: https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/, but it looks like it hasn't updated in a year, so likely whoever in the Lean community needs to investigate why it isn't updating.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 tracks our goal of making the server natively offer search engine indexing. The current separate archive tool model has some advantages (search engine load can't break the server, for example), but I think it'll be worth doing the native version when we can find the resources for it.
Source: I lead the Zulip project.
I don't think the actual chat conversations need to be indexed, in fact as a platform for chat I appreciate discord for what it is. though irc also worked fine for me back in the day.
What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
For some topics and subjects that is fine. But for support for software (even open source) I feel that it is a loss and actually has contributed to a decline of information availability on the internet.
Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.
By those that have an account and that know on which "servers" to find the content they're looking for.
> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
And that's exactly the problem. Discord is a great Teamspeak successor (I suppose; I've never used that). It's a horrible substitute for a bug tracker, development roadmap, forum, release announcement feed etc.