Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums… I get how this happens, but it still sucks.
Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums… I get how this happens, but it still sucks.
And that is where activitypub is a godsend.
I’m thinking of a hacky solution where we have llms create a knowledge base for scraped discord data. Could be useful.