IRC is pretty much the opposite of the definition of a walled garden. Its content is not discoverable by search engines by default, but that is not the definition of a walled garden, which is typically a synonym for closed platforms where you have no choice how to access their content (e.g. being forced to use a specific client software).
Many years ago at $WORK we had an in house IRC server (pre-Slack). It was well archived and logs were easily searchable. It was a pretty easy setup.
And for IRC, I think this is a good compromise between "everything is public at all times" and "everything is walled off and private at all times".
If you want to have a log of your use, it's possible. If the org running the server wants a log, they can do that too. Is that possible with something like Discord?
The point still stands. Regardless of how easy it might be to access logs, not a single popular Freenode (or otherwise) server I spent years chatting on has an archive online.
It might as well have all taken place on Discord.
Turns out what matters isn’t how easy it is to access logs but whether anyone cares to do it.
I’m not exactly sure why you think that matters. Everyone in those channels have logs that any program can read.
The point that I am making is that the capability and software exists, even for others to view, if you want. I mean: did you need an account or specialised client for these logs?
Thats the point.
Be the change you want to see if you want archives uploaded. Or, do what others do: grep your local files or znc logs.
Being knowingly throwaway meant that any long term knowledge got turned into a blog post, documentation, a forum thread, or a search engine indexable logs-to-html site in the worst case.
With discord the message might get pinned if a mod thinks it was useful and remains undiscoverable for the majority of people
> remains undiscoverable for the majority of people
IME it doesn't work very well. If you hang around a discord server long enough you see the same conversations happening over and over and over. And the app is not good at helping you finding old conversations (which is why they are repeated endlessly).
It's also very bad at resuming where you left off, so it's incredibly difficult to follow an active thread without missing anything:
Lots of people log channels, and that is another discussion when you see yourself online. They usually mention it in the topic though that the channel is logged.
For me, a "walled garden" is also something controlled and regulated by a party I have no influence over. They can arbitrarily make and change rules and decide who to let in or not, which feature to drop, how the UX looks like etc.
IRC is an open, community protocol, and as such not a walled garden. Even if I'm not involved, which I could be, I trust the composition of people there much more than any single commercial actor. The power dynamics are fundamentally different.
A single instance (an IRC network) may be a "walled garden", in control of the group that runs it. The incentives are different. Also because people can simply migrate to another network given the open protocol (and different, third party clients; the API cannot be shut down like with Twitter/X). Historical example e.g. Freenode ownership change.
It's not a website a search engine can crawl but anyone on the internet can log all the messages on IRC as long as they want without any restrictions. In fact if you are nice, you will never need to login and can have conversation for as long as you want with a guest login. It is not a walled garden.
A walled garden is a platform where auth is required to come in and user content is owned and stuck within.
IRC is not a walled garden. You will have a better time registering with Nickserv, but you can pull content and logs channels. So, more like a fenced meadow.
