The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich. There is still room for technical alternatives for users who

The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich. There is still room for technical alternatives for users who want something different, even if that is only 0.1%. Even with Slack being very popular, irc is not going away, because it still is better than Slack in areas that are valuable to people. No lock-in, open source protocols, and also the fact that it's still good after all these years.