And it does not help the real modding communities problems and ideas are only discussed on a chat. Everything written on a chat is doomed to be lost after a few days. Nobody scrolls through days/weeks/months of chat logs. And every information that is lost on the chat is also lost for the next visitors.
Facebook, Reddit and Discord in my eyes should only serve to guide people to the correct websites/forums/communities instead of trying to replace those. Unfortunately people prefer fast and easy answers over correct ones.
Yeah I feel the same.. I only started using Discord a year ago as people kept pushing me into it ("why aren't you on discord", "I can't believe you don't have discord" etc etc blah blah), and a year on I really don't rave over it. It has its uses and its popular with a lot of people so I use it to access those communities. However you've just spoken about my biggest frustration. No one goes back through hundreds of messages so its just a sink of information that essentially goes down the drain (the search tool is like searching for the word "and" in a giant word document lol). At least on Reddit & Facebook its easier to go back and look at topics instead of being flooded with nothing by comments, most of which are not important since we all know much people love to argue on the internet (I had to scroll you a 300 message Trump argument the other day in a Civilization 3 discord just to get an important Civ 3 mod link that I'd seen posted only a few hours before but had forgot to download urgh). Call me oldschool but nothing beats forums for easy browsing and locating old topics, their only weakness is that they are volatile. A bill doesn't get paid or an update/server move goes wrong and bam.. all gone. Seen it happen so may times to places I cared greatly for.
Yup that's always what I believe and why I created my Starflight, Master of Magic, Sid Meier's Colonization, and of course the Freelancer FB group as while they're good for news and joining lost communities they are also very good at helping to preserve existing forums (I think I posted above a while back that the FB group literally saved a lost Starflight forum and brought it back from a similar situation to the FL community one you just posted about). When people visit my FB groups the first thing they see is a pinned welcome and info message that contains links to all the FL servers and forums I know about (including this one of course), the groups description contains the same text & links and I occasionally post topics that link to forum threads saying "check this out etc".
I don't run the Reddit group so sadly I can't do the same there but its definitely not a community to ignore as there's 3 thousand FL fans there! I was really shocked yesterday to find so many FL fans there.
BTW I didn't know about that FL forum, cheers for that. Will have to add it to the list and join up!