I suspect many Discord refugees will be looking for an all-in-one app that can do both solid text chat with discord-style servers and many rooms/spaces in them, as well as the ability to seamlessly have voice/video calls with groups of friends, as well as screenshare applications to watch movies together or stream games while chatting.
IRC is only capable of the text chat part, and would require an additional video conferencing app with a separate account to fulfill the video call part, which most would find off-putting after having it all-in-one for over a decade.
Why has IRC not been mentioned? The basics of Discords UX is based on it after all.
I suspect many Discord refugees will be looking for an all-in-one app that can do both solid text chat with discord-style servers and many rooms/spaces in them, as well as the ability to seamlessly have voice/video calls with groups of friends, as well as screenshare applications to watch movies together or stream games while chatting.
IRC is only capable of the text chat part, and would require an additional video conferencing app with a separate account to fulfill the video call part, which most would find off-putting after having it all-in-one for over a decade.
And IRC now has web clients that can display inline images, upload them on a channel, preview URLs, push notifications, keep history, and more.
I use The Lounge but there is also Convos and a few others.