Some recent toots imploring people not to use Discord, because it's a black hole for knowledge compared to other things with web-searchable archives.
Point taken.
But they were suggesting using web forums, and, well, our forum runs on some neglected host beyond its supported lifespan with no easy upgrade path, and… 😩
Nobody uses FidoNet or Usenet or wants to join mailing lists anymore.
What would you recommend as a forum for an #OpenSource project? Ad-free with minimal (preferably zero) infrastructure maintenance requirements.
Alternately, do you have any recommendations for how to make the knowledge in a Discord more web-discoverable?
A naive bot that just dumped incoming messages to static HTML would be super easy. But I think privacy and anti-spam concerns make write-once archives a bad idea. Are there any implementations better thought out?
@keturn is this what Gitter is supposed to be for?
@robotbill Yeah, Gitter has more focus on open communities. Search-engine-friendly archives you don't have to be signed in and joined to the channel to see.
Gitter was acquired by Element (the driving force behind the Matrix chat network) a little under two years ago. It's not clear to me what its future is.
@robotbill The announcement tells a story about bringing more of Gitter's features to Matrix: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matrix
but aside from a GitLab integration bot that still posts to Gitter's twitter account for every deploy event, there's been nothing on the Gitter blog, and nothing obviously Gitter-related on Element's blog.
Element has gained beta support for threads recently, I guess?
@keturn I assume you're specifically thinking of public Discord servers? My main experience with Discord has been as a private space; it's not really designed for public-facing content -- which, I suppose, is the core of the problem from your perspective.
I'm not even sure there is any Discord-equivalent which is public-facing. Forums are different in a number of ways, mainly in that they are asynchronous (you usually have to reload a page to see new content) and have a very different way of organizing content.
I'm kinda seeing this niche as a longtime unmet need, really -- but it's just part of the sparsely-populated space I'd generally label "open-source collaborative platforms".
(Possibly a quick way of filling the public-access-Discord niche would be to patch Revolt -- which is more or less open-source Discord -- to allow read-only public access via web and API, this making it accessible to search-engines and other tools.)
Hope this is useful and not just me babbling.