Or maybe just stop?!?

> Often enough you do want "instant" messaging to be ephemeral - by design. Different types of tools for different use cases. Would you want all your _oral_ conversations to be systematically recorded and archived? Some yes, most not.

In some ways, Discord is the worst of both worlds: all your messages _are_ recorded and archived forever(ish), and anyone who wants to hurt you can join a Discord server and trivially find every message you ever sent there (just put "from:username" in the search box), and find six lines to hang you or uncover personal information you wanted to keep to a limited audience. But also the messages are not indexed in a way that is helpful for people trying to benefit from the knowledge represented in the archive.

Sometimes people manually summarise and organise knowledge in read-only channels full of FAQs and useful links - but that's still only accessible via the Discord client, and will be lost if the Discord server owner deletes the channel or the server, so there's no proper long-term archive.

(Some researchers recently downloaded two billion messages sent across a decade on public Discord servers and published them online with ineffective anonymisation: https://discord-unveiled.niko.lgbt/ . Evidently Discord does not have good protection against scraping, so a long-term archive is possible but only for people nefarious enough to violate the Terms of Service.)