Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with.
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
I've just started adding logs to notifico (ex: https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28), which is very barebones. Don't get much time to work on it, but I'm working on implementing search in a cost-effective manner. If the ~3000 IRC channels that use Notifico opt-in to logging they'll get it for free permanently, and I'll be offering nightly dumps to an SFTP server of your choice to make sure there's no lock-in.
You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku, Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC network discourage logging, and many communities are outright hostile to it.
Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed.
Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've already been making changes to make it more difficult to log or export your data.
Thanks for hosting a service to help host the logs in a public manner.
As far as logs hosting though, this only works for as long as you're willing to host though. It seems unlikely that Discord will disappear overnight -- or if this was a risk, I'd assume they'd be acquired with a large userbase.
I've written IRC and Discord bots and don't think Discord bots aren't much more difficult. One of the best strengths of writing a Discord bot is that if your bot goes down, you can query and fetch lost history fairly easily. This isn't doable in IRC unless you put a bouncer in front of your bot or the server is set up to feed clients with history.
I've already run it for more than a decade, it's not going anywhere :) The project is also open-source, and the daily SFTP log exports can be imported into another instance. I hate lock-in.
Ultimately, it uses an irrelevant % of resources on a dedicated box used for other projects, so it's not a financial or even operational burden. One of my favorite things about IRC is that if all you want to do is a JOIN a channel and PRIVMSG some people, the same code I wrote a decade ago works fine today. The project went almost 6 years without requiring a single code change from me, other than accepting 3rd party feature PRs.
I may have missed something last time I looked at it, but Discord was making it harder to react to all messages and wanted to force you to only use slash commands. The whole discord.py saga - https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028....
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.