A depressing and often annoying situation we find ourselves in is the large swaths of companies and users using Discord as knowledge containers. What used to be knowledge bases, support sites, forums, and other publicly accessible and indexed bits of information are now stored in black box Discord servers.
This information is at the whims of the server owner and Discord itself. There is no way to save it (unless you join and scrap it, or screenshot it, etc), there is no way to view it without an account, there is no way to know it is there unless you know of the server prior. This is fine in the moment, when you know of a server and can find what you’re looking for, but in most of those cases you’re trying to recall something you know exists in a specific location.
The issue is when you have a question but don’t know the answer is in a Discord server you don’t know exists. You can’t just use a search engine, or if you like to ask your flavour of GPT. For now this is generally fine, because if you know you have a question about something and you find the related site or social media account you’ll likely find the link to their Discord. And to be fair, I even do this on my Commission Resources page — the first thing I link to is a shared repository on a friends Discord server. I did try to make it as painless as possible, because the channel itself is public and temporary accounts still exist right now.
Once a server is removed though, what happens then? I link to a lot resources on my site and for a good number of them, Wayback Machine will have me covered (likely forever). It cannot see inside Discord servers though, so where does that information go? With so many companies and creators using Discord for their information dumps, what will we do in the future when their servers are long gone?