Everything publicly put on the internet is permanently logged if someone decides to log it, that applies to every modern website or chat software.
Yes but I’m pretty sure it’s a lot easier with irc. Like you can just view perma logs for irc servers. Not as easily digested as say something like this. Maybe I’m explaining it poorly.
To collect logs for an IRC server you need to set up a client that will always be on and connected, otherwise you will only have logs from when you had the program turned on. You can’t view logs from before you were doing that, unless someone else shares them with you. IRC servers don’t publish their internal logs normally.
Are there people lurking IRC just collecting logs, sure. But that also goes for everything else. If you delete this comment, there are people out there who will still have a copy, it’s not that hard. It will likely be on Internet Archive too.