That's an interesting thought.

I can definitely see the gating being a problem down the line, although there are solutions to this (one that comes to mind is publishing channel archives in some indexable format periodically).

The "why" feels flow-related to me. The message board format isn't super well adapted to active discussions, but real-time chat on spaces like Discord and Slack feel snappy if you want to have a "chitchat experience" with other devs. I wouldn't necessarily call it a new thing though; before Discord and Slack, IRC was a pretty popular way for OS communities to organize, and that too suffers of the same lack of indexation (unless steps are taken, i.e. publishing archives to make them accessible to those outside the chat server).

From the perspective of someone who runs some public-facing OS-related Slack / Discord spaces, my approach has always been to try to get folks to create issues on projects' GH tracker when it looks like other folks would benefit from the insights or to organize reports / requests. That way, while the initial chat happens in the chat spaces, there are artifacts that are also available outside of them so that others can engage without joining the chatrooms.

To the last point about repeated support request -- questions asked should always drive documentation. Whether it's on Discord, GH Issues or some forum, if a question is asked repeatedly, it should end up in the FAQ / troubleshooting docs. That feels more like an organizational problem than a problem with the platform (case and point, StackOverflow is a treasure trove of questions about everything and anything, but there's active moderation to weed out dupes despite everything being indexed, repeats will happen regardless of previously asked questions being available or not).

I've never used IRC (despite being in dev long enough, just never have), hence feeling this was a new thing.

I agree that pushing out to docs is ideal but in reality I doubt this happens very often.

I just searched for an error in the TypeORM slack and slack said results were limited due to the number of messages in the community - not helpful, I suppose some kind of auto push out to an indexable location after X time would be a good solution.

I guess I just find it odd that we are happy for the discussion of open source code to move behind company walls. I realise that github is a company but at least it is indexable and archivable in some way, Discord and Slack are significantly much closed

Yeah, the Slack and message limit thing is why Discord > Slack as far as real-time chat goes for projects. Free workspaces in Slack have a 10k messages history limit so once you get big enough, you start "losing" older messages (although they still exist, and if you end up paying, you get access to them again).

There are some other options out there to address the "company walls" bit. Products like [Matrix](https://matrix.org/) come to mind; it does require a bit more setup, but you keep control over data. It makes discovery a bit harder though (i.e. you can assume that a significant % of folks already have a Discord account for some reason, and people aren't averse to creating accounts on Slack, but they might back off from engaging with solutions like Matrix because it feels like a new thing they would need accounts for).

Confirmed this is a valid bug. Had a family member open a tor tab and paste an onion site into that tab. As I dont use Brave... I instantly saw the .onion address in my DNS query logs. Unbound DNS on my router is configured to NXDOMAIN those requests. Maybe I will instead add that zone and redirect to a funny page.