Is there no way to index discord chats? Is Matrix a viable discord alternative? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Subject6051@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I was going through this wonderful thread https://lemmy.ml/post/4540882 and found many of you talking about discord as it's a crime against knowledge for not allowing indexing on it. I think we are talking about indexing by search engines like DDG and Google here and I know that discord questions don't show up in search results and it's somewhat of a closed source system, which is terrible. Now, is there no way to index these chats on discord?
Also, is Matrix a viable alternative to discord and are Matrix chats indexable and are they indexed on google or duckduckgo? And are Matrix public chats indexed? Does Matrix have features such as creating a thread to ask question and somewhat of a forum like structure that discord has?

Unfortunately, I know for a fact that Matrix would probably not replace Discord as Linux would not replace Windows, although both Linux and Matrix are definitely better and more open. There are not enough people on Matrix when compared to Discord and this will never happen unless Discord messes up big (look at you reddit)

I know this is not a support forum, but a short question, what is the alternative to https://discord.com/servers, here discord lists all it's public servers and you can find one which suits your interest and join in. I haven't found the equivalent to this for Matrix yet.

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[-] drcouzelis@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 year ago

OMG I'm on a technical Discord server where some brilliant people spend all day responding to technical questions on a niche subject and it makes me SO ANGRY that all that knowledge is tucked away inside Discord, non searchable, and going to disappear some day.

So now I use the Discord Chat Exporter CLI program every couple of months to save all of that knowledge into text files on my computer.

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

[-] Subject6051@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I like you already! lol

[-] ZenArtist@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

This looks great!

[-] ptman@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

Matrix is viable. There are https://view.matrix.org and soon https://archive.matrix.org/ for indexing by crawlers
https://servers.joinmatrix.org/ isn't quite the same as https://discord.com/servers. Joinmatrix lists matrix home servers, like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, ... for email. But once you have an account on a home server, you can use the "explore" feature to browse rooms known to that server (or another that has public room directory). There is not central place to list all, since there is not single central matrix server. Same with lemmy. You need to use https://lemmyverse.net/communities

[-] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

I don't think there is a way.
Yes, matrix is a viable alternative to discord and it does have similar features like creating threads and having different rooms. I don't know if Matrix chats are indexable.
https://servers.joinmatrix.org/

This may also be helpful https://joinmatrix.org/guide/

[-] Subject6051@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I thank you but I doubt if this is even remotely comparable to what we have on Discord

[-] sweng@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

Discord has a weird and confusing definition of "server". The equivalent in Matrix would be "spaces" but they are not very commonly used (and I'm not sure there is a public list). Instead Matrix is most often used with individual rooms.

Due to the distributed nature of Matrix it is actually impossible to create a complete list of public rooms. However, one probably fairly complete list can be found at https://view.matrix.org/. Most clients have room search built-in, so you would rarely need that list

[-] floppy@rabbitea.rs 3 points 1 year ago

linen.dev will sync to Discord and then allow indexing. The owner of the Discord server will need to set it up though, so probably doesn't help unless it's your own Discord.

[-] vreraan@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

https://www.answeroverflow.com/ I found this to search and index discord servers, but servers need to join this service.

[-] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I've heard Revolt recommended as an open-source Discord alternative. I have no idea if servers are indexed but at least it's hypothetically possible.

https://revolt.chat/

this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023

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