Discord is a black hole for information

Not having to take care of your own infrastructure is pretty nice though. This is just like companies that only have a Facebook page and no own website.

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it.

I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others. I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.

I haven't made that bad an experience with Discord. I remember having an issue with Svelte and simply not finding the answer even though I thought that should be a fairly common problem (disabling SSR). There were threads on Github with the same problem but no answer, and closed. I went to Discord to ask someone there, but first search for it in the chat, and lo and behold: It was there, white on black.

Maybe I was lucky, that the problem had such a clear keyword to look for. But writing an extensive documentation of ypur project takes a lot of time, and having a place where ALL people can ask questions and other people can find them is a good thing (nothing against Svelte's docs, they're amazing). Maybe Discord could improve search functionality, and a clear culture of channel organization still has to develop

But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.

Separate from the more fundamental problem of using chat apps in general as a wiki, Element/Matrix's concept of spaces are a big step forward as a Discord replacement for me. They're a lot like Discord servers, but they can be nested, and you can add rooms to multiple spaces, and they generally seem to be a lot more lightweight.

There's still a ton of polish issues to work out, but stuff I really like that I wish I had in Discord:

- I can dictate which rooms in a space get surfaced by default. When I join Discord servers, it's really chaotic, you have this giant list of rooms you're suddenly subscribed to, and it's overwhelming. With spaces you're not auto-subbed to every single room in the space. There's even a way to search for rooms in a space, which would be a feature I would want in Discord if Discord didn't just throw every room on a server at your face in one list.

- I can import spaces into other spaces, so I can make a public space that's a composite of other public spaces.

- Nested spaces can be used for organization, they kind of act like folders. Discord sort of has this concept with sections, but Discord sections are only 1 level deep, and spaces can be nested multiple levels.

- The first thing I always have to do when joining a Discord server is update notification settings for all of the rooms I'm in, and Spaces has that problem less (although I wish there were easier ways to set notification settings for an entire space).

- A giant feature that I wish existed in Discord is that rooms can be shared across spaces. So I can have a private space in Element that is only for me that I use for organizing a set of rooms I've joined across multiple spaces. Say that I've joined tech support channels for multiple projects. I can have one space that lists out all of the individual support rooms.

- And obviously, Element spaces/rooms can optionally be previewable without forcing the user to join, which Discord still refuses to do.

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I'm not saying that everyone should just drop Discord right now and that Element is better in every way, more just pointing out that the direction Element is moving is really positive. It's a little bit exciting to see a UX effort in Element that (while still very much in-progress and in-development) is not just competitive with Discord, but better than Discord's system on its fundamentals. I haven't seen spaces get talked about that much, and they're a massive UX improvement, one of the most exciting non-protocol/infrastructure changes to Element I've seen in a while.

Of course Element doesn't fix the problem that Element/Discord are messaging apps, not wiki platforms, and they're not going to get indexed by Google. But at least its a bit less of a black hole, even if I wouldn't advise replacing your wiki with it.