IRC
Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that.
Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix).
It’s also not searchable on Google either (yes you can run a bot but you could do that on discord/matrix or any other service too).
As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there.
Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that goes away as soon as you open the tab. No need to scroll up to where you got mentioned if you don't want to.
The ephemeral nature of IRC makes it a surprisingly relaxed experience.
Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more people find the thread the higher the likeliness to find a solution.
IRC is nice for quick back-and-forth type conversation for topics which are more “common”, where the requirements to participate in teh conversation are lower. For example, a discussion on a potential feature request.
Except that newer products like Slack and email providers with their conversation view are conflating the two use cases.
Slack tries to implement features of a forum by allowing threaded conversations. Conversation view email removes the nested threads and makes the email thread look more like a chat as opposed to a forum discussion with multiple threads.
You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].
Examples: - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html - http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html
How discoverable it is on Google depends only on Google and on how those logs are stored.
In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.