You can, and I did, but at some point I must've accidentally fumbled one of the many 'would you like to back up your data to...?' requests as I recently had a warning that my Google drive was nearly full. This was perplexing as I very rarely use it, so I check and lo! A years worth of photos off my daughter there. Not happy.
This happened to my mom too. She told me she can't do any more photos because her storage is full. So I checked her android phone a and somehow the cloud backup got activated (we explicitly turned that off!!) and our family photos were uploaded to google cloud..
I hate google so much for doing this.
And if you think IRC is too old for the modern world take a look at matrix or xmpp.
How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy.