[thevagrant]

The impact of walled gardens and "use our app for a better experience" has accumulated.

The constant moving of communities is also a problem. We dropped irc, join us on slack. Crickets.. er we moved to discord. Each move must impact engagement negatively.

[D13Fd]

I feel like so much has moved to Discord. That’s great for immediacy and back-and-fourth interaction but it puts all of that information that used to be Google searchable into a black hole of Discord searches.

[WaffleIronMaker]

You might be interested in Linen (https://www.linen.dev/) which aims to make Slack and Discord communities Google-Searchable. I cannot attest its effectiveness, but I figure it seems relevant.

[ghstcode]

Could you elaborate a bit more about everything moving to Discord? Is this a thing generally or just a side effects of being in a team that uses discord for work?

[Brian_K_White]

Many communities have moved to discord. Where once there might have been a web site on geocities and an irc channel or mail list, now there is just a discord server.

geocities and all those little sites are gone, and what replaced them are a sequence of less-googlable less-preservable things like myspace pages, facebook pages and groups, blogspot/blogger pages, and now discord servers and youtube channels.

There isn't a good platform for individuals and small communities that aren't profitable businesses to host their resources and documents and communications. There are only companies trying to capitalize on people's desire for it, providing something that only purports to provide that platform but really doesn't.

In some ways, there is nothing stopping people from making niche topic sites, but something seems to have changed that makes it just less likely. Maybe there used to be free tiers (was tripod and geocities free?) and now there is only cheap ($5 for a vps), or maybe it's that now you have to do more work yourself setting up a vps vs a premade site host, and the current equivalents of free and fully managed are discord & facebook?

Something is definitely different and somehow the aggregate result is a lot less of the old plethora of niche topic sites. Maybe just that everyone got jobs and has no time to make those sites any more, and now all we have are developers personal blog sites which are really just promo for themselves not really of any value to you or me.

Maybe also the passing of the innocent initial window of time where an individual or small group could run a phpBB on the public net without it getting hacked or overrun by spam or sued or in legal trouble for the member-written content etc, without an income stream to pay moderators and lawyers.

Probably it's a combination of those and even more other factors I'm not thinking of.

[solarkraft]

But it would've been the same thing with IRC. Worse even, since that has no history (by default).