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.

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.