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At Typesense [1] we face a similar problem with Slack. Slack has been great for us in terms of quickly discussing an issue but the free plan limits the searches to last 10K messages. We would be happy to pay for it but the current pricing model is just not catered towards large communities where users interact in periodic bursts. Most communities will not be able to afford it.
I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that it's against Slack's ToS.
If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.
1: https://github.com/typesense/typesense
Something we're trying to do about this on the Matrix side is MSC2716 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc271...) - the ability to import archives of existing content into Matrix, and thus 'lock it open' and decentralise it for posterity: as long as one of the servers participating in that room stays alive (and the room is set up with infinite data retention, obviously) then the conversation will live on forever. (That MSC is also well worth a look for those interested in how Matrix works under the hood; MSC2716 was a surprisingly tricky problem to solve but it's basically finished now!).
Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards. After all, information longs to be free :)
I'm a strong believer in Zulip with respect to a perfect mix between instant messaging and actually retaining information
- functionality for a public export (can also restrict to specific channels), .e.g. https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/
- in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that would make it possible to index without setting up a separate archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172
- messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)
- you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you clicked on search result, you lose the context about the remaining results
- you can login with Github (so no need to register for many people, at least for programming-related projects)
Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/
It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
I remember their official twitter responding to someone that exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump
But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.
GitHub works great for me - with Discussions tab being very useful e.g. https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/
Also helps that you can publish and serve static HTML/JS files in the same place. With video support added in markdown I have little else to wish for.