so (and this may have changed, i used to go on irc mainly in the fuckin 90s) but you need a client, back in the day the big ones were mIRC and pIRCh. i am an mIRC loyalist myself.

it comes with a server list, you just double click on a server and itll connect you. then if you type /list it will list all the channels (rooms). you can see how many people are in each channel, and you can double click on the channel list to join one. then type away

You need to download a client, and then you connect to a server. Once on a server, you can join (and create) channels.

https://www.irchelp.org/faq/irctutorial.html

As far as servers go, I personally enjoy tilde.chat and libera.chat

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.