I would personally call telegram/viber/whatsapp/et al. groups/chats/channels "dark web", since information is not indexed there and is basically decaying over time. In about a decade or decade and a half ago, forums flourished, it was really easy to find and share relevant information with relevant group of interested people. I particularly was interested in car's DIY service & retrofit topics. Unfortunately everything is mostly in messengers these days, which won users by offering real-time responses, but providing no real way of topic sorting or proper history. Duplicates of questions and answers of different topics and threads mixed together into an information garbage bin.