The point still stands. Regardless of how easy it might be to access logs, not a single popular Freenode (or otherwise) server I spent years chatting on has an archive online. It might as well have all taken place on Discord.

Turns out what matters isn’t how easy it is to access logs but whether anyone cares to do it.

You sure? There are loads. Have you tried looking?

Heres an archive searcher for #bitfighter on freenode: https://bitfighter.org/irclogs/search.php

That's the counter example?

A channel with one day logged in 2024, then nothing for two years, then nine days logged in 2022, five days logged in 2021, etc?

What about big tech channels like, say, nodejs and javascript?

I’m not exactly sure why you think that matters. Everyone in those channels have logs that any program can read.

The point that I am making is that the capability and software exists, even for others to view, if you want. I mean: did you need an account or specialised client for these logs?

Thats the point.

Be the change you want to see if you want archives uploaded. Or, do what others do: grep your local files or znc logs.

Many years ago at $WORK we had an in house IRC server (pre-Slack). It was well archived and logs were easily searchable. It was a pretty easy setup.

And for IRC, I think this is a good compromise between "everything is public at all times" and "everything is walled off and private at all times".

If you want to have a log of your use, it's possible. If the org running the server wants a log, they can do that too. Is that possible with something like Discord?