I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.
It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.
It's purely because of how easy it is to create and manage a community. Imagine if there were a way to make a Lemmy instance without any fees or knowledge of selfhosting, it would be an instant success.
Pretty soon search engines won't be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won't look that out of place anymore.
If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won't be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?
A server I'm in actually has a bot that, whenever a user types a command, will respond to a question with an answer.
Simple example:
@\Johnny: "Hey, my browser says 404, what does that mean?"
@\Support: !\404 @\Johnny"
@\Bot (using Discord's reply feature to reply to Johnny's post): "'404' is a common error message that can be caused by a variety of issues. Here are steps to resolve the most common issues:..."
I didn't feel like typing out steps to check if the website is down for everyone or to fix it if it's just you, but you get the idea.
The server I'm in doesn't typically handle questions about that, either. They're more specialized to something more specific that that, but, again, you get the idea.
Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass.
It sucks but can you blame them? It's a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.
We're going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.
This doesn't necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it's being applied to is real.
Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.
We're going to see a lot of changes in online community tools and in the way people use those tools. Lemmy is not exactly revolutionary either, it's modern but it's still a forum at its core.
Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than "it's been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn't even write into it!" I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you've merged onto the highway.
I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they'd finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord's forum feature is terrible.
The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there's a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable... OK, I see your point now.
I support the take over. People thinking that they can pick and choose who makes money and how are fooling themselves. The developer who wants all his IP protected so he can make money is upset that a larger entity is also making money is honestly tough fucking shit. Either go back to the origins of the internet napster days or shut the fuck up and live with what we created. There isn't any middle ground. Its only going to get worse unless you make this place hostile to people building walls and stealing all the data for themselves.