As someone trying to learn everything I can about the Hive technologies, I find it frustrating how much stuff is buried in fast-moving chats in Discord, but at the same time it is as you say where people socialize.
There is still a lot of it on chain, but for the most part it's to be expected to have casual chatter on platforms that cater to that. Even Reddit introduced chat and channels.
Sure, and at work we have Slack even though we use Jira and have long written docs - options are good :)
Believe it or not, Slack was used quite a bit on Steem. It has since been moved over a self hosted/free option called Mattesmost.
At work we had to sponsor a tiny community user group because Slack search on free accounts is really curbed. This is another reason I think some things being in a more async, but also relaxed environment with full text search (and google!) being able to bring things out of the depths is worthwhile.
But also the memes and shitposts too :)
So you have chat on one end and 2,000 word blog posts on the other end of the spectrum, with meme-wars and photoshop battles somewhere inbetween.
If I remember, it is limited to saving 10,000 messages. Steemit Inc sponsored paid licenses of Slack, so we had unlimited history, but it was a limited invite system.
It's a shame all commercial chat option are so freaking expensive.
And the fact we can quickly go through those without noticing shows how much of a fire hose chat systems are - one I am in for retro programming is unfollowable because by the time it is morning in my timezone about a thousand messages have been sent
That's why everyone on Hive uses Discord and the dev channels are on Mattermost.
I haven't seen those, guess they are invite-only or for core devs?