I grew up with IRC (and still idle on various channels, and Discord is definitely the closest anything has come to replacing that community feeling from the 90s

I grew up with IRC (and still idle on various channels, and Discord is definitely the closest anything has come to replacing that community feeling from the 90s and early 2000s. They're all very niche servers - I'd say about 10 daily active users - which definitely helps cultivate that same intimacy (for want of a better word).