Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create a nice webclient for IRC (which you could self-host with little effort and get to own your data).
(Since IRC is a protocol, let's use the mIRC application for comparison with Discord.)
Unfortunately, many of them are still a work in progress. Still, a fully featured IRCv3 client connected to a modern server should be usable by normies.
- play simple games on Jabber thru the client, like chess or checkers
- inline LaTeX with Kopete
- embedded YT videos with Kopete or some Pidgin plugins
- automatic message translating with Google Translate or similar. It just worked. Again, it was a Pidgin plugin
- OTR/Omemo encrypted chats
- video/audio chats
- multi user chats
- file transfers
- chat from either text mode or from a graphical client
- chat with Gtalk peers
- scribble in a whiteboard
Please, gen-Z ers, stop comparing Discord with IRC, you just show ignorance. If any, compare Discord with Jabber and what we had from 2007 to ~2013-14 and beyond.
IRC and IM are totally different platforms with polar opossite usages. IRC chats were made to be public in order to join a public conversation, IM was made to chat between people you already knew, and sometimes in a group with few peers.
When they became teens classical IM platforms began to decay/rot because of social media and mobile messengers.