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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).


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


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.


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


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


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


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.


What’s recommended here? Self-hosted Discourse?


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


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


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


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




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