And they have also long had places for collecting persistent, searchable information alongside their IRC presence; usually public bug trackers and/or forums.
It has become all too common for a project to offer only Discord, which not only makes all community-collected information more or less ephemeral, but also locks it away behind some corporation's ever-changing terms and conditions, some of which are onerous.
GP's complaint is not that ephemeral chats exist, but rather that there is often nothing else.
