I don't really want my wisecracking with my friends published forever, so WAI?

I agree, there's a solid case to be made for "archiving requires additional work" compared to "archived by default with very high effort required to escape it" like most of the web today; just look at the recent discussions of the US government buying up various databases of personal data. Few people would want that to include what they said when they were 15 and bored.

Course, the bigger problem with centralized corporate services is that discord themselves could be shipping off that data on the backend to god knows who... but from the "protect me from other individual harassing me forever about shit I said once" front, Discord has some obvious appeal.

Even so, I see community members searching for gossip on what some ex-member said on Discord years ago.

So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.

Yeah, it's slower, not impossible.

Throwing back to the past, central logging is new, and twenty years ago it would've been hearsay where many people couldn't verify those claimed past conversations. I would have no issues with a two-month default expiry policy for these things.