Chats are not forums. Discord is the same bullcrap than Reddit and Facebook, just newer on the enshittification cycle. People should just have forums and someone could make a containerized microservice that federates it to Activity Hub. Now it’s searchable, indexable, publicly available and archivable.

Absolutely agree that hiding knowledge behind a paywall is crappy. I hit that issue so many times with Red Hat that I standardized on debian variants.

Searching, while a function of any modern forum, is easily bypassed with a modern search engine / crawler. Unless the forum admin takes the unlikely step of disabling web crawlers on their site, you can pass the site:<website> filter into your search. For example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=subtitles+site%3Aforum.jellyfin.org&ia=web shows forum posts regarding subtitles.