I stumbled across
this article in The Register regarding IRC, Discord, Slack, Signal, Telegram, MS Teams etc etc and thought it may be of interest because not only does Zulip sound like a better IRC, but it is open source and possibly also free (read the whole article to understand).
Of course, convincing people to use it may be harder as Forums definitely rule, followed by mailing lists, with IRC bringing up the rear. But who knows?