[callalex]

Locking knowledge behind something that isn’t publicly searchable or archivable works fine in the short term but what happens when Discord/Slack/whatever gears up for an IPO and limits all chat history to 1 week unless you pay up (oh and now you have a bunch of valuable knowledge stored up their with no migration tool so your only options are “pay up” or lose the knowledge).

[Kiro]

No-one complained when projects had IRC channels/servers, which are even worse since they have no history at all.

[callalex]

At least people treat IRC as ephemeral and place all documentation elsewhere. People are writing whole wikis inside of Discord that are not publicly searchable.

[Gormo]

Good projects still do rely on IRC -- Libera.chat is full of proper channels -- and logging bots are ubiquitous.

[Kiro]

And you never hear anyone complaining about those. "Locking knowledge" was never an argument before and it's not now.

[okasaki]

All IRC clients have local plain text logging and putting a .txt on a web server is trivial.

[Kiro]

Local logging doesn't help much for searchability when you're new and it requires you to be online 24/7. Anyway, that's beside the point. Even if IRC had built-in server history it still has the same problems but I never saw people being outraged about it.

[halfcat]

What’s recommended here? Self-hosted Discourse?

[tacker2000]

Github issues or discussions. Or some other kind of forum like Discourse as you mentioned

[heavyset_go]

Matrix and a wiki would solve the community and knowledge base issues.

[mplewis]

Matrix has severe UX issues which drastically limit the community willing to use it on a regular basis.

[Arathorn]

historically, yes. matrix 2.0 (due in two weeks) aims to fix this.