Genuinely curious, what's wrong with that? Did you expect a different platform like Slack?

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).

What’s recommended here? Self-hosted Discourse?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

it would be better at the bottom of the first documentation page, after the reader has a better idea of what this is

There's a whole FOSS ecosystem of chat/collaboration applications, like Mattermost and Zulip; there's Matrix for a federated solution, and tried-and-true options like IRC.

For something called "Reclaim the Stack" to lock discussion into someone else's proprietary walled garden is quite ironic.

People that don't like wasting money?

Not capturing the information and being able to use it in the future is a huge opportunity cost, and idling on discord pays no bills.

Wasting money on... better solutions that are also free?

There is a difference between wasting and spending money.

Also noticed this. Everytime I see a project using discord as main communication tool it makes me think about the “fitness” of the project in the long run.

Discord is NOT a benefit. Its not publicly searchable and the chat format is just not suitable to a knowledge base or support based format.

Forums are much better in that regard.

> Discord is NOT a benefit. Its not publicly searchable and the chat format is just not suitable to a knowledge base or support based format.

I don't think people who choose Discord necessarily care about that. Discord is where the people are, so that's where they go. It also costs close to nothing to setup a server and since it has a lower barrier of entry than hosting your own forum, it's deemed good enough.

That said, modern forum software like Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ or Flarum https://flarum.org/ can be pretty good, though I still miss phpBB.

> Discord is where the people are, so that's where they go.

That doesn't sound right. Each Discord community is its own separate space -- you still need people to join your specific community regardless of whether it is hosted on Discord or something better.

> though I still miss phpBB.

It hasn't gone away -- the last release was on August 29th, so this is still very much a viable option.

It's all in one app and the app has a ton of users. Anyone running the app can join any server with a click of a button. There are no separate accounts required to join different communities.

So communities being separate "spaces" doesn't create any meaningful friction with regards to adoption.