For site managers, read-only mode means you don’t have to actively moderate, but it’s not the same as archiving. It turns off interaction, but technically everything else stays the same. You need to host the instance, keep it updated, maintain the same servers.
True archiving means moving from a dynamic app and database setup to static HTML. There are a few community scripts out there, but trying it in practice showed me how complex it actually is. I think it’s too hard for individual communities to solve from scratch. Providing standard migration solutions that also address UI representation and data privacy handling could go a long way toward better preserving communities.
There’s also a conceptual dimension: if community platforms supported the full lifecycle from the start, it would likely lead to better systems overall, in ways we might not even have in focus now. In regular product design, planning for a product’s retirement is just part of good design.
On a smaller scale, groups are a good analogy and similar use case. Right now sites often end up with dormant or abandoned groups, or groups disappear without a trace. If we had expected lifetime and sunset planning in group setup from the beginning, it could support site managers to be more purposeful and organized with groups overall.