Slack was the first to really get that right, and Discord effectively emulated them and made it available for free.
IRC users could get there with bouncers, but those were always a lot harder to get going with.
We might reminisce about irc but we all prefer discord.
Even the searchability of indexed irc has been surpassed by other knowledge sites. It would have to be something extremely niche these days where the only source of info is in an irc chat log
My main problem with Discord is that it's someone else's centralized, for-profit company and has no apparent barriers to enshittification[0]. As Reddit recently demonstrated, it's probably a mistake to build communities on top of something like that.
Matrix is a good candidate for a modern successor to IRC. It's not quite as slick a UX as Discord, but it addresses the main advantages Discord has over IRC.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
a lot of people who are into tech stuff already have a discord account making joining the community a one click process, the instant nature of it seems to appeal to younger users more than async forums, it's a fairly mature platform so it has a bunch of moderation/customization/integration features you might want, etc.
> are discord conversations persisted and indexed on search engines ?
nope (and that is a drawback many point out)