i love using discord servers as a knowledge base!!! i love having to figure out which channel to check the pinned messages in and then scroll 15 messages down before i can find the very basic information i'm looking for!!!! this is such a great system!!!!!
It was wikis. Wikis were - and indeed, if you can find non-Fandom wikis, still are - probably the best way to store and share information like that. (I mean from a non technical user standpoint - just in terms of how easy it was to find the information I was looking for and, if I couldn't find it there, easy to update with the information once I found it elsewhere.)
I know part of why we stopped was so many wikis got gutted by Fandom and similar commercialization efforts ruining them, and so many of the discord servers are because it's easy to do mindlessly but like it was so much better and I just miss the day where everything had a usable wiki.
even smaller communities and projects used to have dedicated sites with all the information you needed. now it's all just thrown into a discord where a group of friends hang out all day and bury the useful information in the pins with inside jokes new users are not going to understand. it's mind-boggling how so many communities fall into this trap not seeing how inaccessible and unsustainable it is
If I was less tired I could write a long, angry essay that boils down to "you are correct here" but also like...of all places to store knowledge bases, discord is probably the worst possible one, because there's no hope of internet archive type services cataloguing that data later.
If and when discord shuts down, the collective and sudden knowledge gap is going to stagger so many indie communities, online creative projects, etc. So many resources will just be lost, aggregate knowledge of various communities erased.
Please, if you run anything where a knowledge base is important, at least back up your information off discord. Making a website or a wiki is ideal for ease of use and finding information, but even having just a document you store information in so you can reconstruct if discord goes down is so important.
Like, if you're someone who's never looked into making a website before, but you have some sort of project you're working on that you want to share with the world, you'll probably want the easiest way to get your information out there. You can make posts on various social media sites, but need some sort of centralized hub. With whatever project you're working on, you probably don't want to be worrying about how to setup a website (if you're someone who's never done that before). Comparatively, you're probably already on Discord, and it's free. So you can quickly throw together a server, and that'll be "good enough", and you can focus more of your time on whatever project rather than trying to also figure out website creation. On top of that, websites can cost money or contracting out someone to make you a website costs even more money.
But like... as ya'll have mentioned already, this sort of system sucks for trying to actually find information. I know personally in a couple of discords I've gone into, I just end up asking the help chat because that's easier than trying to track down where whatever information is pinned. And I'm sure my questions had been asked before, but as to where that information lived? Who knows. I've already written about it here why I think everyone should have their own website (cohost post specifically if you prefer), but I do really wish people had a bit more experience with it given how simple and relatively cheap it can be.
