I hope you get many beautiful snowfalls in your life yet

I mean, I get it. If I’m working on something and hit a snag, posting in a forum where the response time may be measured in days or more until someone replies with further questions, to which I then reply at my earliest convenience and wait another day for a response, then have to see when I next have time to try the advice and hope that settles it…

Well, I’d certainly prefer to get input right when I’m working on it, while I have the time and mindspace for it. In that light, maybe forums simply aren’t the best solution anymore, or at least not by themselves. But integrated chats have been tried before, haven’t they? What was wrong with them?

Oh but there’s a shit ton of documentation that’s only available on discord and that’s not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.

I absolutely agree. That’s part of the point I’m trying to make: The death of Discord might well cause those things to be lost. Hoping for it to crash and burn is counterproductive because thay will only do damage.

Instead, we should figure out why people moved to Discord in the first place, because…

Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions

…clearly, whatever makes forums “the best” isn’t enough. Then what is it that Discord does better? How can forums work to match it and entice people back?

I don’t know. I’m not one of the people that preferred Discord and I can’t speak for them. But maybe we should listen first instead of wishing ill on them and hoping their favourite places die.

Well, you have one part right: it won’t disappear magically. If it does, it will do so quite naturally, unless someone actively preserves it, e.g. by archiving the chat histories.

Of course, you might mean the people with the knowledge that wrote those histories in the first place. You know, the people that used Discord instead of forums. The people that left forums. The people that apparently didn’t want to use forums.

Why would you assume they’d move to forums? Clearly there was some reason they chose to use Discord, so why wouldn’t they just find a replacement?

Discord isn’t the issue. I mean, Discord has plenty of issues, but this particular one is a cultural one. Unless we find a way to entice people back to forums (or some other publically indexable platform), they’ll just keep going elsewhere.

So maybe instead of condemning Discord we should ask “Why do people prefer it?” Then we can figure out how to address that and actually do something about the root of the issue.

They probably don’t intentionally use it to store information so much as quickly and conveniently exchange answers and questions. Forums have evidently proven inadequate for that purpose, so unless people find a better solution and make it stick, the lesson sure won’t.

assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access

That’s what I mean by issue of culture. I don’t think the habit of gathering on discord-like services to quickly exchange info will change, and if the explosion of bsky is anything to go by, people will just find the next shiny, pretty and well-funded platform that totally definitely won’t enshittify somewhere down the line to pay back their venture capital investors.

We’d be cutting the weed without pulling the root.

It’s still information. I agree that it should be available publically, but information available to few is still more than information available to none. I agree that you shouldn’t have to join a Discord server to get that information, but eliminating it entirely so that not even those who do join can access it doesn’t help anybody. It would only hurt a few, but a few is still more than zero.

It’s an issue of culture, so simply eliminating one repository doesn’t fix anything. They’d find some other messaging service to congregate on.

That’s not to say Discord are saints and there is nothing wrong with either their business or their platform. That is a separate issue I think we all agree on.

My point is strictly about the hypothetical deletion of Discord over the drift towards opaque information silos: It won’t help.

It will still have the social platform inertia that keeps many people on Twitter despite wanting to leave. If enough of the other people you want to talk to are there, what good is leaving?

In the case of communities, it’s even worse: you can possibly operate multiple platforms as an individual, but a community splitting its conversations across two platforms is now two communities. The best you can hope for is that most of the active members on the old (also) join the new and eventually bring their activity with them, but that relies on a lot of individual decisions.

It also has plenty of utility for non-information-storing purposes. It’s more of a cultural issue than an issue with the tool.

Besides, wouldn’t it take all the information there to its grave as well, making its death a net information loss? After all, information confined it is still information stored somewhere, just not as easily accessible directly from the Web.

Is [that] legal?

The question of legality hinges on the courts’ willingness to hear the case and make a judgement. Doesn’t matter how many public sector union lawyers press charges if they end up thrown out by corrupt judges.

In other words: Darth Sidious Voice “I will make it legal”