I think a lot of the arguments in this thread are pointing out that for info worthy of holding onto, you should probably be using forums. Part of the Discord issues is using it to hold onto permanent info (which requires an account to try to search). If you keep chat with the idea that it should be ephemeral in, then migrating isn’t an issue. The folks that mean for their IRC rooms to be longer lived, have public logs in HTML to search & those that didn’t, well they didn’t care that that history was lost since it was never meant to live forever. Without IRCv3 there isn’t even the concept of history (which has usability consequences needing a bouncer or an always-on remote terminal), but for instance with XMPP many rooms just give you the last n number of messages which is enough to understand the current conversation to participate, not read the entire log since room inception.